Tales From a Bus in Los Angeles: the Angry Man and the Cripple

The 333 is a rapid route bus that travels down Venice Boulevard from the West Side, the ocean, the hippies and the medical marijuana stores to downtown Los Angeles. I get on around midday at Centinela, and pay the $1.25 with a moist note and coins hot from my 10 minute wait in the sunshine. “Hi” I tell the bus driver, as I always do. He gives his usual reply, which is nothing. The bus is alive with bodies swaying from silver poles. A black man with a wiry beard and matching afro, wearing a white t-shirt with palm trees and “Los Angeles” printed in a cutesy pastel font, is shouting wildly. I look around to see what’s causing the commotion, but realize that he’s staring into space.

“You better get a dollar in pennies,” he says to no-one. “Count them pennies too.”

His facial hair is tinged with white. He’s wearing blue and gray basketball shorts and is sitting with his bare feet up on the seat in front of him. Two brown leather sandals lie vacant on the floor. No-one is sitting next to him. With every garbled sentence he’s getting angrier.

“Where you gonna take a shower?” He shouts into the bus. “YMCA? You better get dipped for lice. You better get triple dipped.”

Everyone else on the bus is staring at the floor or out of the windows. Even the driver seems unfazed. He’s playing soul tunes on the radio in his bus-driver’s cockpit.

The woman next to me has a young boy on her lap. She tickles his neck and he starts to laugh.

“CUTCHY COO!” Shouts the angry man from across the aisle. The noise is violent. “CUTCHY COO!”

His face is twisted up like a ball of yarn.

He stares out the window in silence for a while. I get to reading and trying to memorize the Emily Dickinson poem on the banner above him. “Poetry in Motion” says the label at the bottom of the billboard. I read each line, then look away and try to repeat it in my head.

Tell all the truth but tell it slant –

“I think I’ll go shopping,” says the man from underneath. He sounds relatively calm, although his voice is still loud enough to overwhelm the bus.

Tell all the truth but tell it slant –

I can’t remember the next word. Curious? Or does it begin with an ‘s’? Something about blighted?

We come to a stop and the front of the bus starts to whir. The driver lets down the mechanical ramp and a woman with a bent back and a walker starts to climb on board. She’s wearing clear-framed glasses and has long, wavy, light hair.

Tell all the truth but tell it slant –

Success in circuit lies

Too bright for our infirm delight

The truth’s superb surprise.

It comes back. There are too many strange words. I keep mixing “bright” with the meaning of “infirm” and remembering, wrongly, “blighted” in there instead. What does she mean by “Success in circuit lies”?

Then the man starts shouting again, this time ferociously. “YOU CRIPPLE!” he shouts at the woman with the walker as she shuffles along the aisle. “Takin’ up all that space on such a hot day! You should have stayed home. YOU SHOULD HAVE TAKEN A TAXI!”

“Shut-up!” someone shouts from the back of the bus.

“Dying your hair in the sun…” the angry man mumbles. “Look at you…” He straightens his back and slopes his mouth down into a mocking face, tilting his head from side to side. “Sitting up there thinking you’re so great.” His mouth opens and closes above his folded arms. “Cripple,” he spits.

Everyone stares at the floor or out the windows. I stare at the angry man until he catches my eye and then I stare out of the window next to him. We’re passing a closed-down gas station, the windows shuttered with boards and every inch covered in black and red graffiti. It’s so obvious and sudden that it looks like a monument. Women push prams beside the wire mesh fence. Men in baseball caps brown in the sun, waiting, leaning against street signs. None of the graffiti contains a word I can read.

As lightening to the children eased

With explanation kind

The man’s arm severs my view as he pulls on the cord. “Stop requested!” he shouts over the mechanical voice announcing “stop requested.” He grabs the orange and black plastic bags next to him, both full with what looks like clothes and tied with a knot. “I’m going to walk for 30 minutes,” he says. “I’m not gonna stay on this bus.” He must have put his sandals back on a while ago. He stands up and grabs the pole above his head, starts to make his way down the aisle as the bus wobbles back and forth, his arm extending and bending with the motion. Everyone is looking now as he nears the woman with the walker at the front of the bus. I’m holding my breath.

The truth must dazzle gradually

Or every man be blind.

“Have a nice bus ride downtown,” he says as he walks past her into the doorway.

“I’m not going downtown,” she replies.

The man stops and leans back inside the bus. “Where you going then?” he shouts. “What stop you getting off at? You want to come with me to the bank?” Then he steps down into the street, mumbles something about “50 cents” and keeps on mumbling as we pull away.

Tags: bus, Los Angeles, Metro, Tales From a Bus in Los Angeles, Venice