On the Bus With Kathy Jo And sometimes, nothing happens. Tonight the bus is nearly empty ~ the driver, calm. There's a rare selection of window seats and you know it won't get crowded. No one stares at you. No one mistakes you for anyone they'd want to talk to. You pick a seat in the very back to make sure. I'm listening to Leon Russell's, "Stranger in a Strange Land." That's everybody on the bus. Being a stranger brings out the best and the worst in us. People would give their lives for someone they wouldn't give their seat to. A bus is a tiny, moving room full of people who don't want to be there. I never know what or who I'll see. But it's the only time of my day that is completely mine. When I'm on the bus, I can't do anything about the things that worry me. I can't make a call, write a check or find anything. Feeling like Mary Poppins on her magic carousel horse, I relax and the world releases me. Maybe I'll imagine I'm dancing across London's rooftops with soot on me face. Maybe anything . . . The bus flies through a pot hole wide enough for both back tires to hit. Startled. The scene changes. I'm in the movie, *I Never Promised You a Rose Garden* -- the young psychotic screaming at her psychiatrist, "You want to cut my bangs with a hatchet." Returning to the reality of the bus can seem a blessing. The green-white fluorescent light makes it easy to forget the brittle-cold night. I'm on my fourth bus of the day (had to grocery shop), the last one home to my ten-year old son, Leo. When he's with me, sometimes the bus driver lets him keep his sixty cents. One even gave him a little cardboard bus. We provoke a certain image that I find amusing and comforting~ the mother lion doing whatever it takes to get to the Giant Eagle for her young. But riding busses can be a nightmare, even before you get on. It's hard to begin some days standing on a busy street corner, especially when it's cold. Everyone stares at you. Roofers scream crude nothings out of trucks. A frighteningly thin woman smacks one of her children for swallowing gum. Sometimes the whole scene is so familar that I feel like I'm trapped in a single day ~ like some busstop *Twilight Zone.* I'm standing on the church steps when I feel what starts as de ja vu and turns into clairavoyance. I know that the woman with the children and the gum will ask me for a cigarette. I'll give her one and light it. I'll watch her barely miss burning her kids with iiced him playing with his hair like I do mine. He mocked and exadurrated every move I made while staring at me. At first I tried to ignore him and figured if I didn't move, he couldn't mock me. That seemed to piss him off. Which scared me and I couldn't move a muscle and felt like I couldn't breath so I looked right at him, trying to convey my feeling that I knew what he was doing and I didn't hate him. You gotta love someone who starts immating everything you do on a bus headed to Squirell Hill. Everyone sat there watching me to see what I'd do. I couldn't do what I saw them do ~ sit there looking at the guy like he was your typical psycho scum on the 61B. And after I smiled at him, he kept mocking me, but in a different way. A way that made me feel good 'cause he knew I didn't hate him like the rest of them. Then it was so funny. I just couldn't believe it happened. But I never felt afraid. I always feel safe on the bus. I'm part of the bus culture. The few, the proud, the passholders. I've seen thousands of people and never saw dried blood in the corner of anyone's mouth. And I've been riding the bus and walking the streets of Pittsburgh long enough to have seen enough shit to make me feel like there is nothing that separates us from the people we feel entitled to look down on. A man sat next to me, threw a dirty sheet over our laps and asked me how I felt about oral sex. On the bus? As the gentleman with the sheet was being taken off the bus, I kept asking him, a little louder each time, if it ever worked. Asking why he picked me. I can't help but wonder why I'm the one they pick. And when they want to talk to me, I do. When you're waiting for the bus home in front of the old Bank Center on Wood Street, you can't sit on the window ledges because they put up fencing, the same kind they use to keep pigeons away. Well, I wouldn't want to spend my work day looking at a window full of bus riders, either. We start to hate what we can't handle or can't have .. . . A van ignored the "stop here on red sign." The bus driver made the turn anyway, forcing the van (that can't back up for shit) and six other cars to move. I love looking at the scowls of nervous drivers and their passengers. *Yes!* When I look out the window of a bus, I'm fifty feet tall, I can see into the big rigs on East Carson Street ~ truckers tip their hats to me. I barrel down the narrow streets of Pittsburgh. A single bus can block four entire lanes of traffic or come within inches of cocky mountain bikers (how's that for a heart-attack you fiber-eatin' bastard!). *Ride a bus like normal people, buddy.* Well, at least the new busses don't leave swirling black clouds of gritty fumes behind them anymore. And even high school enemies become instant allies in the strict, unsteady atmosphere of a bus . . . An empty bus is a fast bus. Almost home. Tonight, the barren trees seem frozen but relaxed. Tonight I'll say "good night" to the driver because I'm pretty sure he'll say it back. I know that someday I'll miss walking down my street, the blue snow of a full moon crunching under my feet. My groceries help keep my balance. There seems a sad luxury in going from your house to your car to exactly where you want to go without having to talk to or see anyone. Share a simple secret with a wild man. It isn't so much where you're going but how you get there. See yinz on the bus. copyright 1994 kathy jo kramer "How can a thing be wrong if it's done with love?" Suzie Atkins' response when questioned about her part in the Manson Murders