Portland Busses...

I misread my return home ticket...the 1 in 2:30 was obscured by the stamp. So I was two hours late. Next train doesn't leave until 6. At least I think that's what he said.

After playing mobile phone Yahtzee amidst cigarette pirates I decided to shuffle on up to find an internet caf or [preferably] bar. A cab driver pointed me up Broadway with the caveat that he didn't know anything about the internet.

The first two blocks had only a few people strewn about on various flat surfaces. Passing conversations about jailed husbands emanating from a gaggle of mid-40s who looked in their 60s I crossed onto 8th street.

A bus stop ahead with several shiny busses stopping to spill their contents out onto the brick and paved streets before quickly melting away again. One of these shiny, vintage looking busses didn't drive away at all though and it's spilled contents bobbed outside its windows. The bus driver, trapped in the cab was turned around, half hiding behind the wall at his seat. "I'm calling the police" he yelled and a young girl outside squeezed her boyfriends arm and relayed the message in 3rd Person. "He's calling the police." she said excitedly. "ya" he muttered back. Theyre eyes all watched something towards the middle of the bus, still inside, but I could not see what the driver had locked himself on the bus with.

As I approached the bus a shriek from its center drowned out the noise of the crowd outside. From behind the shady reflection of the street and crowd outside I could barely make out the image of a girl pacing back and forth in the aisle. In front of her, pressed up against the glass were two bodies grappling with each other violently. Hair was being pulled, wrists grasped and fists, when freed, hammering down or up in short spasms before being grasped again. No leverage for a lethal blow. More like the frustrated pounding of a fist on the hood of a car that will not start.

One figure rolled off the next and I could see the face of an older man, white hair and pink, sweaty cheeks pressed against the moist glass. His arms raised in defense, his eyes lacked the fury and fear which an actor might use if asked to reenact this scene. Instead they held instead the cool and alert calm necessary for survival. For him, at that moment, there were not spectators or shrieking girls. There were no bus drivers with cell phones or apathetic passers by. There was only a younger man trying to kill him.

This younger man would have been called a 'punk' several years ago, but I don't know what they are called now. The young, violent, white pseudo-intellectuals who ride that edge that exists between simple-style and 'fuck-you!, making them both attractive and dangerous simultaneously. They don't have jobs, or if they do they are outwardly bored and hostile to the bourgeois concept. The only thing that separates this 'punk' from the street trash are his youth and his ability to speak passionately about something. And that a young shrieking woman found him attractive.

At this particular moment the young black-haired man was yelling passionately at the cowering old man while his girlfriend shrieked on. I couldn't actually tell if she was goading her boyfriend on or trying to make him stop.

In the beginning there wasn't much difference between the punk and the old man I thought. They had most likely both contributed to the escalation and as the boiling point was reached, they were both locked together, oblivious to all but each other. Rage is like that. It's called a black-out rage not because it's alcohol-induced, but because your mind is so intensely focused on the task at hand that you can remember nothing, save some details about that which you are focused on. Sometimes you remember nothing.

But the punk got the upper hand and that's when things changed. He was now in the position of giving mercy, justice or cruelty - he was in control. He had won. The crowd outside came back into focus, as did the shrieking girl and the bus driver's threats. They all returned from the dark periphery. He then got to weigh all the evidence and decide which was to administer.

As the figures in the window faded farther into the reflection of their spectators and the shrieks of the girl became just another distant city noise the young man still stood challenging and the old man still slouched, heat moistening the glass and arms reaching skyward.

I turned and continued my walk, leaving the image of the pristine, 50's era bus parked neatly near the garbage less white curb cooling in the shade of the prestigious maple trees flanking this lazy drive. From the country-style brick houses could have easily emerged a brightly colored family on their way for a sunny picnic.

The bus doors had been closed, which I thought was odd. Wouldn't the driver have opened all the doors and windows if possible to let them out as one does when a giant, angry wasp is locked inside? Allow the older one to escape and the younger one to follow him outside, the girl shrieking all the way. Shrieking off the bus instead of on. Shrieking outside at the brightly colored families beneath the cooling maple trees.

But the doors were closed and the windows up and the wild-passenger tamer cowering half behind his seat, but ready to open the door and spring out should the ruckus migrate forward. Was he trained to do this? Was he trained to protect the shady maple and sparkling stone pavement from the in-transit violence contained within it's doors? If the explosion had happened a few blocks back, where the bricks are made of cheap cement and the only shadows cast are those of decaying buildings and cars with no headlights; would he have opened the doors and helped them tumble out onto the sickly steet?

I turned and kept walking up the street. No biggie I told the other gawking spectators. I've seen much worse than this and shame on you for gawking so! Pedestrians!

I realized as I crossed the street that I already knew what happened. What caused the girl to scream and the young man to assail and elder. I thought I knew. Without conscious effort I knew that the old man had some how offended the girl and the young man was defending her honor. She shrieked at the old man who had abused her in some perceived manner. She shrieked for his blood.

It next occurred to me that I had absolutely no idea why they were fighting. It could have been a million things, mathematically speaking. It could have been an overt, socially definable (and punishable) infraction on any of the threes' part. It could have been an altercation stemming from a quirk or peeve of one individual. It could be that one or all of them were insane or were perhaps staging planned or impromptu performance art piece depicting the over-throw of the current American regime by the young, angry youth.

What do we expect when we cross so frequently and intimately with so many strangers? Such sophisticated and often broken personas overlapping and filling such a closed space such as a bus. If neighborhoods tend to define, attract and collect 'like-minded' individuals, then the busses ferrying these people from neighborhood to neighborhood are very unique places, and possibly one of the only places which mix these polarized citizens together. Like neutral platforms or mobile churches making their way from tribe to tribe.

The bus is it's own sovereign neutrality, existing not beside ours or anyone's nation as Belgium lies next to France, but is rather a great nation in and of itself stretched apart and pulled across a country like the taffy veins of a varicose and aging beast. The bus has it's own language and it's own economics and currency. It has it's own geography as well; it's own ghettos and it's own beach-front properties. It has it's privileged areas and it's own suburbs which devalue as they move closer to the poor areas. And everyone, upon entrance to the bus moves directly to the bus-neighborhood which most closely resembles their own.

The street people enter from the back of bus to populate the U shaped seats where you are forced face each other. Where everyone's back is against the wall and no one is behind you. The elderly and frail occupy the front of the bus, in the same fashion, but so they may freely converse with the driver, and be made to feel more safe and protected in open dialogue with their guide.

Within the hind-quarters of the mini-country exists its own tribes; probably the most distinct and polarized than the others. Here the impoverished persist all the rules familiar to them at home on their streets. The blacks seek spaces near other blacks. The latinos sink more comfortably into their seats when next to another spanish speaker smelling of cheap beer. The white passengers divide themselves between foul-mouth youths wearing backwards baseball caps and rap-t-shirts and professional bums sporting pony-tails and white beards.

When lack of seating in the other sections forces a member of another group to the back of the bus, the decisions of where they sit follow a different set of rules. A set of rules understood and practiced by all passengers in all sections of the bus. A safe hierarchy which all, regardless of sex, race or class distinction fall upon. They are, in order: Economics, Gender and Relative Sanity. An economically sound and sane younger woman is the highest class on the bus and by far the most coveted by all others. Conversely, a younger, dirty, crazed male is at the bottom of this intermittent social class and passengers seek to avoid his proximity at all costs. I am sometimes this male. And I avoid the former class as much as they avoid me.

There are both written laws of the Transit Nation, as well as a plethora of unwritten customs passed on from generation to generation by example. From those not aware enough to find these rules out by oneself, they are happy to tutor you with cold stairs, crossed arms and moved seats.