The Incontinent Racist

I JUST WANTED to go to yoga.

I do a kind of yoga called Bikram Yoga, which involves being in a room heated to 106 degrees, while you stretch and bend in ways that would make Mary Lou Retton blanch. As you might guess, this causes a fair amount of sweat, and the Atwater Village studio invariably smells of feet.

It smells bad, friends. Real bad. But that smell was nothing quite like the olfactory assault endured this very evening during my commute. By bus.

“What?!” I hear you say. “You live in Los Angeles. Only day laborers, nannies and homeless men travel by bus in Los Angeles. A mid-level bureaucrat like yourself should travel via a sensible, beige, automobile, presumably a Camry.”

Yes, the Camry is indeed beige. I tried calling it “light gray” once, but that sounded, well, worse. Still, I hate traffic more than the average Angeleno, and the bus, in my silly, silly mind, was a relaxing way to avoid it.

Wrong. Bus travel in Los Angeles is similar to the Hobbesian musing about the human condition: nasty, brutish and short. Well, except the short part.

I left City Hall at 5:34 p.m., plenty of time to make the 6:30 class at the studio, a mere 7.3 miles away. When an asthmatic Kenyan marathoner could cover the distance in the time required, one naturally presumes that travel by the magical internal combustion engine will be swifter.

No.

After some confusion about where, exactly I needed to go to pick up the 91 Sylmar, I found my stop. It was in a logical location, at the corner of Spring and Temple streets, in the shadows of City Hall (i.e. “The People’s Place of Business.”)

I, however, was across the street, alongside a sign proclaiming a stop for the 92 Sylmar. I presumed the 91 would stop at the same place as the 92. Silly Dan.

Imagine my surprise, then, as I saw the 91 stop across the street. The light and luck were with me, and I ran across the street just in time and boarded.

The bus was packed, standing room only. I jimmied my way into the only spot left, eight feet behind the driver.

The man seated at first base, the spot closest to the front and opposite the driver, wore a fake fur coat, a ball cap covering his balding hair and several layers of flannel. As it was all of 85 degrees this evening, I thought this odd. He spoke passionately in monologue to the driver, ranting about the poor state of the world as it related to (in order): women, Asians, Jews, gays, bisexuals, lesbians and Dick Cheney. He might taken on blacks, Islam and Al Gore, but I was only going to Glendale.

I hardly feel bad about the piling on of our current vice-president, who is STILL being pilloried for shooting an old man in the face. But the man’s tirade was filled with such amazing ignorance and hate I began to feel queasy. And remember, I lived in New York.

I began to feel a bit bad for the driver, as the poor man couldn’t exactly change his seat. And then the driver spoke.

“Yup. You’re completely on it, man. Fuck them. Fuck them all.”

Huh.

When I first got my driver’s license, my mother told me to “never drive angry.” This ironic advice, mind you, since whenever she got angry, she would go for a drive. It calmed her down.

The Sylmar 92 driver, on the other hand, grew angrier at each mile. And, oh dear God, he suddenly had a reason: a man in a parked car opened his door in front of the bus, causing the driver to screech to a halt.

The driver honked, which, as any West Coast driver knows, was the equivalent of insulting the memory of the driver’s dead grandmother. The honk elicited a rude, and common, reaction from the man.

As expected, this incensed the driver and sparked a treatise against Asian drivers, Asian men, and his sincere belief that “some people are just to fucking dumb to live.”

True. I agree. Some people are too dumb to live. However, ill-advised as this man may have been to open his car door in the path of a 15-ton MTA local, he possesses more intelligence than, say, your average Golden Retriever. (Then again, so might a glass of lukewarm water, but I digress.) But we care for and love Golden Retrievers. Perhaps man-opening-door deserves a bit of the charity we grant hairy furballs.

No. Driver man would disagree. Heartily, I presume.

The driver, goaded on by first-base man, continued his rant for a good five minutes. This may not seem like a long time, if compared to movie watching or football, but is a hell of a long time when you have nothing else to do, and the smell of pee and half-digested popcorn hangs in the air.

Oh, right. The smell.

From the moment I got on the bus, that putrescence, that fetid awfulness, that rotted-ass stench took over my nostrils. My eyes watered a couple of times, and I seriously considered walking the remaining distance, if only to escape that 60-foot moving hell. However, I was fascinated by first-base man and the driver, and I stayed.

I was convinced the smell was coming from a frumpy looking man behind me. He certainly looked the part: dirty clothes, downcast gaze and the skin condition that Michael Jackson said turned him into, well, Michael Jackson. He looked weird, ya dig? Weird. But he was very polite, I will note, giving up his seat to an elderly woman with dark glasses.

Turns out, I was wrong about the rancid odor’s origin. The suspected smelly got off somewhere on San Fernando Road, in an area that I wouldn’t visit without the wrench, the library or Colonel Mustard. The smell remained.

Then I saw them: the pee stains. First-base man had them all over his denim. At least six circular stains marked the left side of his trousers, indicating a lack of care, control or colostomy maintenance. Crumbs sprinkled the bottom of those pants, and a trace of sweat glistened from his brow.

My stop, my deliverance, approached. I pulled the cable. I stepped into the fresh Glendale air, completely late for my class. And since they don’t allow people to come in late (very un-LA, I might point out), I came home. And wrote this.
2 Comments

Adam Rakunas
Sorry to hear about the bad ride. Sounds like the dice rolled against you right off the bat. I used public transit to get from Santa Monica to Gardena before changing jobs; it was a hell of a shlep, but I got a lot of writing and reading done. And, yeah, there were drunks and racists and lunatics on my commute, but that's life in the big city.
Thursday, July 6, 2006 - 03:14 PM


BeenThereSeenThat
It's hard to be enviromentally friendly isn't it. When I lived in LA during my High School years I had to ride the bus and the unique characters and outright stench they were carrying with them will remain seared in my memory. As for life in the big city well I live in Santa Cruz, CA now and we have these exact same characters here( although they are generally more politically correct if not crazier and smellier) and there are only 60K people in this burg.
Friday, July 7, 2006 - 09:29 AM