Tales From a Bus in Los Angeles: the Halloween Mask
There was a man staring out of the window, sitting alone, miles away from anything. Occasionally, he smiled, or spoke, and his words drifted out to the world without an ear to hear them. His dark eyes were bloodshot. His limbs twitched. Every few minutes he would close his eyes and succumb to the feeling, before fading back into the bus seat.
At Venice and Grandview, two women boarded the bus and sat behind him.
“I got $4,000 to find the eggs,” he said loudly to the window.
The two women began to chatter in Spanish. He turned around and listened for a while, his mouth slightly open, his eyes wide, like a child staring up at adults in wonder. Then he burst into laughter. He gave the two women a big, toothy grin - his teeth gleaming white and thick as bone.
The women sat in silence, looking back and forth from the strange man to one another. Then the woman on the right said simply, “you’re crazy.”
To the rest of the bus, and the world outside the window, he didn’t look crazy. He was a well-dressed, clean-shaven Black man with a diamond earring. He was wearing a gray, woven suit. He had a diamond and emerald bracelet, a diamond ring, and a choker made of green and clear beads around his neck.
But inside his head, the world was out of sync.
He sat forward for a while and seemed to quiet down. Then he reached below his seat and grabbed something from his bag. He put it on his head - something black and green, made of material, like a beanie hat. Then he pulled it down over his face.
He turned back to the women with his arms casually resting on the back of the seat. Instead of his face: a green Halloween mask with a wide smile and rows of large plastic teeth, an orange “$5.95″ sticker on its chin.
“You got any coin candy?” he said.
“Oh my God,” said the woman on the right, with her hand on her chest in surprise. The green face gazed back, unmoving.
After a while, the women continued chatting and the man put the mask back in his bag. He pulled on the cord and got up, wobbling slowly. Before he left the bus, he stood alongside the two women, listening intently to their Spanish. Then he laughed - a sweet giggle with closed eyes - and almost fell. He gave them an instruction in gibberish: “Before I get there you tell them [something - something],” pointing in the direction he was headed. Then he left the bus, and one stop later the women did too. The bus was quiet all the way to downtown.
I’m actually experienced with this, and I agree with you.