Ode to 12th and Jackson

This intersection is a living thing. You come upon it slowly, visible as it is from a distance in all four directions, but it still surprises you. Its capacity to shock surpasses the imagination. How debased can humans become, in their treatment of others, of themselves? How thoughtless, how distracted, self-obsessed, how cruel? You cannot know if you haven't spent solid time here, and I don't just mean passing through. I've given up trying to explain it to people. Bosch would shake his head in rueful understanding. Even the more reflective Bruegel captures it in his 1560 Children's Games. This is simply part of who we humans are. 

Twelfth and Jackson's current state is the logical extension of our society's preoccupations: a bottomless appetite for escaping present reality, especially anything involving pain or challenge; a tendency to look after one's own needs and no one else's; and– to paraphrase Hanlon's razor, an endless capacity for what looks like malice, but is really just ignorance and laziness. If you could get an entire city's power structure to continue kicking its biggest problems down the road, you'd get 12th and Jackson.

So why do I love going through there so much? 

Why do I relish the opportunities to step outside there, helping people with their walkers and strollers and carts and wheelchairs? To let them know through my actions that I see them as equals? What is it about these castaways, who reject the capitalist system that rejects them, who've found its weak points and milk them without apology, who remind us that the only thing we all have in common is our stupefying talent for making mistakes?

Perspectives

I haven't always felt this way. But tonight, with the infamous zone now closed, as I drop off my peeps at 8th instead of 12th, and watch them now have to walk the four long uphill blocks to their destination, my heart begins to tell me things my mind has forgotten.

These are the most hated, feared, avoided, abandoned, talked-about people in the city. They will be gone someday, and for the first time I realize I'm going to miss them. Why do I find myself having a soft spot for these rejected souls?

1. Maybe it's because these youngsters feel like they're the same generation as me. Most of them are actually younger, but they don't know that; I still look twelve, and there's a resulting camaraderie of shared experience. Yes, they're making stupid mistakes. Haven't we all, especially in our youth? 
2. Or maybe it's because the American side of my Korean-American heritage stems from similarly humble origins: Dust Bowl Okies and Irish stock, which if you know your history (or have read your Steinbeck), were two of the most universally despised demographics in early America. Otherizing has been a project of all societies, and these folks were ostracized in ways so depressing we no longer discuss them. My grandfather's side is Hungarian (hence “Vass") and they were detested almost as much as ‘those filthy Irish...’ More recently, my family's other half had the (mis)fortune of being Korean in 1980s South Central LA, a time and place that was nice for exactly no one. Does some part of me contain the generational memories of those decades past, echoes of ridicule and unearned suffering on all sides, which surface now in the form of sympathy, as I regard these similarly despised kiddos, who like my American forbears often hail from small, forgotten midwestern towns? 
   
3. Or is it simpler than all that, and more fundamentally because I find it impossible not to sympathize with the underdog in any situation?

Faces

Underdogs find each other, sometimes in unexpected ways. Tonight a trans girl of color and a scruffy young white guy enter as friends, nevermind that assumptions tell us they never would, the former gregarious and the latter with that distinctly rural silence you acquire when you know the loneliness of vast spaces. Because 12th is no longer a zone I have to explain the closure to everyone, and this invites conversation.

She says, “Why are you the only nice bus driver? Or like, the only driver that's nice to us?”
I know I'm not the only one, but I play along. She means the general state of affairs. “I don't know!” I exclaim. “It's not that hard to be nice to people, right?”
“I guess it is!”
“I guess it is.”
“Well, I know you drivers have to deal with a lot of shit.”
“That's true. But people are mostly pretty all right. Lotta people struggling these days, can't expect ’em to be at their best.”

The rural guy nods silently. I'd remembered the girl from previous rides, when she seemed too distracted to notice anything about the driver, but tonight she shared that she had, “and the next time I got on the 7 I was like hold up, what happened to the friendly bus driver?" 

Another young man echoes these words later on, appreciating how I announce the stops. "Thanks man," I reply. “I like being out here. I'm glad somebody notices!” 
“Oh yeah. Sometimes I'm having a shitty day and I blow right past you, but I notice.”
His humanity comes into focus as we continue chatting, talking about his days fishing in Alaska, about waves, swells, and finally about the film Interstellar, the two of us united, transported, seen by each other as we rhapsodize over what is both one of our favorite films, enthusing on various aspects of its cinematography and especially that magnificent score.

Who could ever say these guys are less than human?

I've written often about how respect is the currency of the street. All street fights are about perceived disrespect. Respect on the street, when it is perceived, is often acknowledged with gratitude. Maybe I like the 12th and Jackson crowd for the simple fact that (when they're not having an episode or high out of their minds) they respect me. It feels good, frankly. You don't have to demonstrate respect and gratitude in Bellevue. You can, but you don't have to. But in the spaces I drive, doing so can save your life. And being on the receiving end of it brings me up. 

Saying hey to Vern, an old-timer I haven't seen in a decade. He slept on my bus for years, but he was always going somewhere, on his way toward something, just like he is today. Witness his quiet surprise that I remember his name. He smiles to himself, feeling seen anew, perhaps a rare feeling for him. My heart warms correspondingly at other gents who remember my name, especially two grizzled men slightly too old for all this mess, the one with piercing blue eyes, who fought in Afghanistan because he wanted to help end Saddam’s crimes against women.

Catching up with Nemo on his way to 12th, a young man effusive with praise and gratitude, the kind of angelic personality I've never seen get angry, despite his circumstances. I watch him bring out the light in his friends. “I'm so glad you're still here," I say, "still goin’ strong.” These people can have preciously short lifespans. 

Here is a jeep at 3rd and University southbound, pulling up alongside me after dark. It's tricked out with a custom paint job, glossy red rims, and an elevated chassis. There's a sunroof, tinted black like all the other windows, and it's opening now, and there's a man standing up through it, the driver's head and torso rising into view. He's gesturing, trying to get my attention. I'm illuminated by my driver's dome light. What does he want? I take a chance and open my window.

“Yo," he exclaims, continuing with words of appreciation and gratitude that I'm blushing too furiously over to repeat here. “You got me through that shit for real, all that mothafuckin’ bullshit!” He gestures toward the mayhem back there at the bus zone, presumably referring to a period of homelessness and struggle and late nights on buses. I return his words with appreciation of my own. We wish each other Happy New Year, and I watch with glowing joy as he drives away, a man who's put in the work and gotten through it, driving a fancy tricked-out vehicle that clearly means a lot to him. He dreamt of one day getting here… and he has.

“I don't like that man," Abraham Lincoln once quipped. “I must get to know him better." I like this derided crowd because I've gotten to know some of them. When I feel safe– which isn't all the time– but when I do feel safe, and my needs are met, I'm able to feel empathy for them. 

I imagine this would be true for any of us.

Mirrors 

The single most valuable piece of instruction I got in bus driver training was the great Bob Dowd telling us: Respect everyone, especially the people whom you think deserve it the least. What helps nurture this skill?

Art, and for me especially cinema, is the great empathy-building machine. I think of Roma, Keane, Mati Diop, Andrea Arnold’s work, Scorsese, this year's Nickel Boys, Millet, August Wilson's plays; I think of Tolstoy, Hardy, Wharton, Richard Wright. These works and countless others offer suggestions of what it's like to walk in another's shoes. They remind me that all great stories are actually about loneliness, because loneliness is the premier and universal human problem, especially of our time.

I watch them walk the long walk up Jackson, and I see myself in their solitude, their uncertain futures. I regard their ignorance and confusion, the restless narcissism of drug-addled youth; I regard the ethnic minorities they disrupt and displace (whom I picture above, and who've lost transit through no fault of their own). I consider my coworkers, suspicious and afraid. All suffer in varying degrees; each of us has something to be bitter about. The difference is that my outcast peeps in the street have nowhere to hide. The rest of us walk our hard walks behind closed doors, playing up our facades of competence and class. 

They walk their walk in plain sight.

--

P.S.: Things I don't appreciate about 12th and Jackson:

• Roland. That wasn't cool, bro. Stabbing 10 people without provocation, several of them in the back, just because they were white… Come on, man. You're making it harder for everybody, most of all yourself. Did you really think that would ease your suffering? 

• Which brings us to: Erratic behavior generally. There needs to be a place for people who are a danger to themselves and others, and that place shouldn't be the local ethnic neighborhood. Some sort of destination and intervention is needed– and that intervention will probably have to be compulsory. But that's for people smarter than me to come up with.

• Perceptions. It's not a mob of scary people. As an operator it helps to mentally separate the folks at these zones into two groups: people on drugs, and people behaving erratically– smashing up property, throwing things, etc. Only this second group is a threat. The youngsters on fentanyl aren't dangerous to you; only to themselves. 

• Closing zones. It makes more sense to fix a zone than to close it. By now we know (from the examples of 3rd at Pike and James) that closing zones accomplishes nothing. Everyone just moves down to the next zone. Twelfth and Jackson is an important transfer point and destination (with some of the city's best restaurants - Sichuanese Cuisine, Saigon Deli, & Tamarind Tree forever!), and should eventually have safe, reliable transit, preferably sooner rather than later.