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Back on the 7: Late Night, 11pm-2am

9/30/2015

4 Comments

 
Picture
Third in a series of three posts detailing the same night. See the two posts below.

A woman from Hawai'i asks for a free ride before stepping on, explaining which shelter she's going to.
"Yeah. Hey, thanks for asking to get on beforehand, that was nice." And risky. For her sake I'm glad I was driving. 
"Are you goin' up to Nightwatch?"
"I am!" 
"Awesome, come on in. It's a good program."
"Did you volunteer there?"
"No, but I take a lotta folks over there, and they always say good things about it. There's food until I think eleven." We'll make it. 
"Is it a women's, or women's and men's…?"
"They'll probably send you out to a women's. What happens is you go there with a ticket, and then they find a spot for you somewhere else that you then go to." 
"Okay."

She's been on the street two weeks and already has three job offers on the table. She lists them. "Security,"
"Okay,"
"Walmart,"
"Uh-huh,"
"Or down at Sea-Tac, cleaning or loading, for fifteen bucks an hour. I think I gotta go with that one."
"Oh, totally! I mean, Walmart, forget about it!"
"Ha!"
"I love that you're, um. Stayin' motivated and pushing it forward during this hard time. 'Cause you're doin' the hardest thing, keepin' up the energy and tryna move forward when the you've got the least energy, the odds are stacked against you. I find that extremely impressive."
"Thank you!"
"So, you said Hawai'i. I hear they have the best kimchi in the world over there."
"They do!"
"Man! I'm Korean, so I'm super interested…"

And we're off, talking like a couple of regular people. I could see how much that meant to her.

Not much later I had a similar conversation with another woman, who for years I'd see around the Paramount with a cardboard sign. "Long time no see," I said. She had sad blue eyes and a frail, wizened figure. I used to give her the free treats they hand out on Trader Joe's Silent Movie Mondays. "You look good, you look healthy!"
"Thanks! I got into a program finally."
"Oh, that's excellent!"
"Thanks! Yeah, it'll be eight months comin' up." 
"Wow. Wow! Congratulations." Drug addiction and homelessness. Are there challenges more difficult to surmount than these two? I earnestly share with her similar words as with the Hawaiian woman, my admiration and sheer respect for her dedication. These are heroes as big as any other.
"Thanks. I'm still out here to try to cover rent. My rent's only forty-nine a month, but you know, I'm not getting a paycheck, and I still owe the nineteen dollar late fee from last month!" 
"Shoot! " This is the in-between time, the hardest part, waiting and treading water. But her course is good, and she's still moving forward. I wish her the best of luck.

Bashi drinks too much, and tonight's no exception. Some things never change. A well-dressed father going out for the evening, he staggers on board, barely able to keep balance. He kisses my hand upon recognizing me. Not necessary!
"I love you," he slurs out, vocal cords struggling through uncooperative lips. "Anybody try to bother you, I fuck him up. I, fuck. I fuck. Him. Up. I love you. You're family, you know that?"
"Same! That's an honor, to hear you say!"
"I love you, I'm a good guy, I know you don't think that,"
"Oh but I do! I know you are. You always lookin' sharp, gettin' on dressed nice." I mean that without irony. Nobody else at Rainier and Rose gets on this late in slacks, polishable shoes, and a tucked-in button-up. "That's an honor, what you're saying. How's your daughter?"
"She's fantastic. Anybody bother you, I fuck him up…."

Everyone's falling down tonight. A young man stepping out the door leaves the bus, walks a few steps, then collapses on the asphalt, as though a switch enabling him to live had just been flicked off. I stepped out to inquire after his well-being. At first I thought he's just a drunk who needs to sleep off the effects, but I couldn't just drive away. No one's gonna stop and ask this black thug-looking kid sprawled out on the cement if he's okay.

"Dogg, are you okay? You cool?"
He nodded from his prone position, as if nothing out of place was occurring. It bordered on being comical, actually. Just collapsing to the ground for a quick nap on Pike Street.
"Right on. Stay safe!"
He nodded again.

A woman slightly older than me is overjoyed by the concert she's just gotten out of. She's still riding the wave. "My boyfriend bought the tickets. They were fucking expensive," she says. "I'd totally make out with you," she whispers a minute later.
"Um, uh. You're very kind!"

As I pull away from Roanoke, my periphery catches a familiar shape, just in time for a last minute wave. She's still there, the old stalwart, a neighborhood fixture who enjoys sitting on that one particular bench and watching the evening drift past. I marvel at her reflexes, noticing me and returning the wave just in time. It's been months since I've driven past there, but we still somehow know to look for each other. Oh, how I love life!

My good friend, Celia, came out to ride my last round. I sometimes joke that my friends can be considered in two categories– those who've ridden my bus and those who don't. It's a time commitment, coming out for a ride. I'm immensely grateful. Some people get a lot out of it. I know I do. Celia chats with me, or with whomever's next to her. We share in our love for humankind. Or in the passing moments she would just watch, listening to the world go by. I'm reminded of a favorite line of mine, from La Grande Bellezza*:

"How come he [the poet] never talks?"
"He's listening."

The day turned to night, and then to morning. Neither of us wanted to close out the night just yet. All the stirring cacophony, the multiplicity of voices and details, gradually funneled down, the evening echoing into memory, boiling down to a pinpoint, coalescing into Celia and myself standing in her family kitchen after my shift. We sampled homemade applesauce, still earnestly discussing life. We whispered, that we might not wake her cousins in the next rooms. 

There is always so much to talk about.

---

*If you watch one film made in the last five years, let it be this one. More thoughts of mine on it here.

--
​
And that's all for now, friends! I'm dashing off to Cuba and Mexico for a spell. But I have every intention of returning; look for me on the street and on the web in a week and a half or so!
4 Comments
Deb link
9/30/2015 08:24:14 pm

Wow! Four posts in two days! I feel spoiled. I plan to get on you bus again, just for the sheer pleasure of it. I'd like to sneak on, but I sense that you're too astute for that. But whatever. Thanks for the heads up so I don't come out for nothing.

As always, your stories are so satisfying.Thank you for the time and effort you expend in writing them. And you share! Thank you!

Reply
Nathan
9/30/2015 11:43:53 pm

Deb!

Well, the easy way to do that would be to get on the bus before I take it over! We'll figure it out.

It's great to share. The little moments of the first day just started snowballing, and I knew I needed to start writing this stuff down. I'm amazed that there's such a backlog of 7 stories that the blog was sustained by them for the entire summer! From a reader's perspective it probably feels as if I've been doing the route all along!

Reply
mary
10/14/2015 08:39:51 am

Hi Nathan! So glad to see you back on the bus and the blog. Here's a question for you, as a regular 7 rider: this morning there was a woman exhibiting signs of a meth overdose. One rider called it in (not sure to whom, 911 I suspect) and soon after she got off we passed an ambulance on its way to her. I was moved by this gesture (he had asked the driver to stop earlier but driver needed/wanted to stay on schedule), and glad to see it was an ambulance and not a police car. Do you have any suggestions for how/when is appropriate to intervene when a bus rider is acting erratically? This woman was rocking back and forth in pain and saying she felt like she was having a heart attack. Ideally the driver takes action I suppose, but not every bus is a Nathan bus. I'd also hate to get anyone in trouble, arrested, or worse, who needs medical attention. Very curious for your thoughts and/or experience with this.

Reply
Nathan
10/14/2015 04:41:20 pm

Mary,

Hello! Thank you. Very happy that the response was medical. I would've pulled over and called for similar assistance. Certainly the on-time performance of a given trip is completely meaningless as compared to the woman's need to live– at least from my perspective. Though I have kept driving (while also having called for help) in circumstances I deemed non-emergency. A delay like that at the start of a shift means the next ~7 hours will also be delayed.

It definitely helps if you the passenger calls 911, because that means Seattle Police can respond immediately; the driver's call ends up being directed to Metro Transit Police, a smaller force, and only goes to Seattle Police if MTP is taking too long to arrive. I've had situations on my night 7 where just such a 911 call expedited things considerably.

Issues like this are more grey than I think a lot of people realize. I once had a woman screaming that her shoulder was broken only to have medical officials arrive and confirm that she was simply pretending to be injured, et cetera, or people who thought they were in worse shape than they ended up being. Other times a coughing fit was deemed by another passenger as critical, leading to a 911 call and associated delays, when the cougher in fact just thought the chicken burrito they were eating was really gross!

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