Life, the 27 Bryant Version

by Michael Chacko Daniels

Straining with the weight of two Whole Food cloth bags loaded with farmers’ market produce, the tall, spindly man with the neatly trimmed facial hair—which had earned him the sobriquet Gray Beard for years, and then just Gray—boards the 27 Bryant at Fifth and Market after transferring from the F streetcar.

Gray’s prayer for this farmers’ market day, as on every Wednesday he used San Francisco’s municipal buses in the last two months since a man who saw conflict where there was none broke his jaw, is unchanged: May I get home without a conflict on the bus.

Residual pain along his jaw adds an edge to his late blooming vigilance and caution.

After flashing his senior fast pass, he quickly sweeps the bus with his eyes and makes it to the back before the bus rumbles and rolls into the Tenderloin’s traffic.

As he sits down on the first seat of the empty, molded-plastic bench immediately past the rear door, he thinks, The gods smile on me today! No contumacious drama queens or kings from past rides, no overflowing of uncontainable emotions!

However, he remains on guard as he begins his quiet enjoyment of his weekly bus tour through San Francisco’s Tenderloin. He knows the balance in the bus transubstantiates moment to moment, stop by stop. But he feels he has the advantage—he’s already in the guts of the roaring metal and plastic road dragon, and commands more than 180 degrees over which he can scan, review, and categorize for immediate protection and future reference.

The lean, forty-plus, white woman in a deep-blue T-shirt, tight denim jeans, and brown, well-worn, cowboy boots clambers aboard at Taylor and Ellis—the Glide Church stop, where the meal line snakes into the distance—carrying two, large, cream-colored plastic bags.

Perfectly telegenic. Faded elegance strangles the last strands of youth, Gray composes.

“Thank you, Driver, for waiting for me,” Booted Woman announces; her voice whips across the bus.

Gray goes on extra alert.

Backing into the front seat, she adds, “Most drivers wouldn’t wait for someone running to catch a bus, hauling large bags.”

She strokes the driver with words. Today’s noontime drama begins, Gray thinks, noting that her entry has grabbed the attention of several other passengers.

Hungering for observations—grist for his mulling brain—yet fearing another attack, Gray finds comfort in the distance between Booted Woman and him. He prays that her drama comes nowhere near him.

“My job,” says Driver, an African-American female, who weaves the bus back into the traffic smoothly. “Also my job to ask you to feed the machine.”

“Fed one already. I have a transfer.”

“Show me, lady. Got to keep my eyes glued on the traffic.”

The passenger releases her hold on the bags, one at a time, anchors each with a booted foot, and begins an extensive search of her front and back pockets.

The probing through glove-tight clothes nets no transfer ticket.

“Put the money in or get off,” says Driver, her voice still coasting in neutral.

At the next corner stop, new passengers crowd in, silently skirt around the bags in a practiced dance. Booted Woman thrusts her right hand into her T-shirt’s yoke, pokes around in her bra.

Gray cannot help it. He stares as he notes the plot thickening.

Booted Woman extracts a wet ticket, waves it triumphantly, jumps up, spills squashed clothes out of her bags and exclaims, “Got it!”

“Is that today’s?”

Booted Woman thrusts the slip of paper close to the driver’s face.

“Take that wet trash out of my face! Won’t work, lady, it’s expired!” says Driver, turning up the volume.

“No, it hasn’t! There’s half-an-hour left on it,” she says, holding it at arm’s length to the right of the driver’s face.

“Not that I can see. Pay up or get off. Or I call the cops,” says Driver, voice back in neutral. She will not budge from that position.

Gray watches as Booted Woman shakes her head in commentary, but pays up, shoves her clothes back into the bag, and lumbers toward the back of the bus as the driver begins to make the turn on Leavenworth to begin the climb up the hill.

As the heroine in the drama shifts her vantage point and Gray watches his zone of safety shrinking, he expands into the empty seat next to him with his two cloth bags full of produce.

You have enough of a load to be able to handle any new drama, he tells himself.

The bus jerks; the peripatetic woman is thrown off balance and lands on the first seat of the bench opposite Gray, which is parallel to the one that he is sitting on. Her right elbow misses by a fraction the eye of a young, light-brown, Hispanic girl who is sitting on the third seat of that bench, talking to her older sister, a physically bigger version of her, who occupies the adjacent window seat.

“Excuse me!” says Booted Woman loudly to the startled Young Girl, while recoiling from her with a sharp, stiff movement and widened eyes. “These buses! Got to do something about them,” the woman broadcasts to the entire bus audience. Her left hand grips the vertical steel bar. The other tightens around her two bags.

No one interjects a single thought, or adds to her observation, or comments on her trajectory or disposition.

Where, or on whom, will this loud woman aim her attention next? Gray wonders. Her voice carries. Her thrusts, both physical and verbal, and her intrusive mobility are intended to intimidate all of us.

Gray watches Young Girl freeze for a moment, then return to talking in low tones to Older Girl, who turns to the boy in the back seat of the bus near the opposite window, and asks, “He had a knife?”

Boy—who has a bright-red blood spot migrating in lighter rays across the white gauze bandage on his forehead—tightens his shoulders slightly. He rests his head on the back corner of the bus, nods, and soaks in her sympathy.

“We will have to get off at Mission,” Older Girl says to her sister, continuing the conversational thread in progress between them, but loud enough for the boy to hear.

“This bus is going nowhere near Mission! It’s going in the opposite direction!” announces Booted Woman. Her voice cuts through the vehicle, like a sharp sword.

Her head is turned toward Older Girl, but her eyes are fixed on the window over Gray’s left shoulder.

No one has a comment, not Young Girl, not Older Girl, not any other passenger.

Gray reins in his responses. Do not make eye contact with the woman, he cautions himself. He has decided that unless he wants a bus fight that spills over to the street, he should avoid interacting with such an aggressive stranger.

Am I going to be smack in the middle of another San Francisco bus fight? he wonders. Time to get off, catch the next bus?

But the drama holds him spellbound, better than anything he can watch on midday TV.

The two girls say no words to the woman. They continue conversing in Spanish, build a wall between them and the stranger.

Booted Woman twists her head further rightward in the general direction of the three youths, without looking directly at them. Her right hand rises and cuts through the air in front of her and down toward the younger of the two girls, as she says, “I should stop the bus right now! Call the truant officer. Why aren’t you in school? Cutting school will do you no good.”

Her voice slices through theirs, silencing them.

At this unprovoked attack, the younger sister stops running the fingers of her right hand through her long, lustrous, brown hair, and attempts to give the woman wide-eyed attention. She lifts her head ever so slightly in an interrupted, listening response.

Older Girl edges forward as if preparing for an escalation.

A pause.

Good job! Gray thinks. So young, yet so well-versed in dealing with a raging person. All the woman needed was some positive attention.

The bus halts for a wheelchair user to board.

The girls resume chatting in even lower tones than before.

“Don’t you play with me, girls,” warns Booted Woman. “I will spank you just like you were one of my own children.”

The sisters suspend their hushed conversation.

Young Girl gives Booted Woman some more attention while running her fingers through her hair a little more forcefully.

The driver, who is getting the passengers in the front seats to make room for the disabled man, scowls at the woman for a moment, then returns to tying down the wheelchair securely.

“Stop doing that,” says Booted Woman, her eyes set in contemplation of the world outside the window. “You’ll only tangle your hair.”

The girl stops.

Another short pause, during which Booted Woman reloads.

“It’s a sign of nervousness,” she adds, her eyes fixed on the floor of the bus.

Another pause. Her head swivels another fraction, without making eye contact with the younger girl.

“You’ll become a woman at thirteen,” she announces.

Another movement reverses the direction of her head.

Gray notes that the woman’s revelation has the two sisters’ full attention.

“All girls become women at thirteen after they have been raped by a man,” she declares.

Gray’s head starts shaking; he can’t help it. He hopes his eyes are flashing negatives.

“My mother was black,” Booted Woman says. “Raped by a white man when she was thirteen. Got over it quickly. Became a woman.”

Gray stops shaking his head, digests this new information.

“What are you doing, shaking your head?” Booted woman demands, her fierce eyes aimed point blank at Gray. I must avoid direct eye contact, Gray warns himself, a second too late.

Their eyes clash.

“Tell these young girls you didn’t rape anyone,” the woman orders Gray.

Time to get off, he thinks, his heart pounding.

“Sutter Street,” calls out the automated audio system.

Booted Woman rises reluctantly. Gray feels his breath easing up in him.

Pulling her two bags to her side, she leaves, informing everyone in parting, “All men rape women.”

The two girls converse again, rape and becoming a woman their new topic.

Gray resumes shaking his head. Everyone ignores him.

“She didn’t tell us whether she was raped at thirteen,” Young Girl says to her sister in English as they and Boy get off at the St. Francis Hospital stop.

No need for reality TV today, Gray tells himself, as he ends his trip at the last stop. A full week to go before the next heart-pounding adventure. Can’t wait that long. Must use public transport more often. Maybe go to a different farmer's market every day.

Michael Chacko Daniels, San Franciscan/writer/editor/community worker/former clown, grew up in India. Books: Split in Two (1971, 2004), Anything Out of Place Is Dirt (1971, 2004), and That Damn Romantic Fool (1972). Website: http://indiawritingstation.squarespace.com/.