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    Zen and the Art of Driving the 7

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    “People wait for your bus specifically. They say to me, Oh, I'm gonna wait for Nathan's bus.”

    So said Rahgeh, a fellow operator riding home on my night 7 after a long day of driving the E. We were laughing about why my bus was so full.

    “Oh!” I exclaimed. “Yeah, I've heard that. Maybe it's because they know I'll give them a free ride.”
    “Well also maybe because you friendly, you talk to them, nice…”
    “Nice atmosphere, yeah. Maybe that's why my bus is so crowded!”
    “Yeah it's a lot!!!”
    “At eleven-thirty!!”

    We were giggling. The bus being this full this late made no sense, especially on Sunday. Were some of them taking advantage of my kindness to get free rides or a warm place to lounge? Definitely.

    But my answer to that would be, who cares? 

    I can’t do anything about that, and I’m not going to change my attitude towards all because of the actions of a small few– and who knows, perhaps a percentage of that few actually needs your help. You will never know. You have to give ten free rides so that the one person out of that ten who actually, desperately, legitimately needed you can benefit. It’s just part of the game. I try to go along with it.  

    His laughter subsided. We were drifting toward more earnest considerations. He said, “and your announcements.”
    “Yeah I like to do some of the stops, or all of them if it’s busier, to let them know it’s a real person up here! Let them know that I care. I tell myself, I have to find a way to get along with them, because I'm going to see them again. Tomorrow, next week. Or tonight!”
    “Yeah!”
    “And if you respect them, talk to them, it helps everything. Of course you will have a few days out of the year that are really hard, but it's okay. Most of the rest of it–”
    “Yeah most of it, it’s pretty good. Yeah, I think so in all of life. How we look at it.”

    ---

    The less often you're on the 7, the more scared you will be of its people. Maybe the kids laugh at you because you're white... And it stings, provoking thoughts in you you don't like. Thoughts you know better than to have. I remember a 7 operator I trained with, blazing past a crowd of teens at a zone, because those were the days of unacceptable gang violence. I remember my black American colleague Alonzo telling an ill-mannered black girl, “man, you're an embarrassment to our people.” I recall my driver friend Sonum saying “in the country I come from, if we talked to elders like those guys just did, we would get slapped.”

    Yes, there is injustice out here, doled out by every demographic in every direction. But you can’t play judge, jury and executioner. You don’t know enough. You have to force within yourself the discipline to not be God, but rather just a witness. It’s enough to just bear witness. Try and get to know the people. That always helps, but so does something else.

    Tell it to yourself again and again: Their morality is between them and the Universe. Yes, I believe in What Goes Around Comes Around, but I’ve realized in busland I don't get to play a role in that. I have to prioritize the pleasant present, keeping things moving. If you can let people have the last word, this becomes a lot easier. 

    The operators I most look up to give out love without expecting anything in return. As a woman in a marriage once told me: In life, this advice isn't appropriate. In a relationship it needs to go both ways. You deserve to be loved in return. 

    But. 

    On the bus, things are different. You don’t need anything back. You're teaching. You’re a saint– or, well, you’re trying to be. On the bus you are strong, self-contained, beautiful in your zen presence, infiltrating the air with respect and acknowledgement.

    Look at you go.
  • Published on

    She Strong

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    We were fresh into town from the long drive up from Rainier Valley, approaching Pike Street, our last stop on Third. A large and hulking figure came up to stand near me, silently. We watched the road together. He had on a do-rag and skullcap, with leather construction boots and an outdoor jacket. Partly for my own comfort, I felt a need to break the ice and offered him a transfer.

    “Hey. D’you need this just in case?”
    “Yeah. Ah ‘ppreciate it, sir.”
    “Oh for sure.”
    “What time is it?”
    “Eleven-thirty.”
    “Okay.”
    “Is that a good time?”
    “Yeah. Just gotta make it home before Mom leave for work, ‘bout eleven forty-five.”
    “Okay she's workin’ some serious hours!”
    “Yeah, she gets it done, man…” he shifted his weight, grabbing a stanchion. He was realizing I was someone he could really talk to. I'll never know how or what I do to have this effect on people, but I’m endlessly grateful when it happens. He continued: 

    “Check this out, man. She was raised in foster homes, moved from home to home, dropped outta grade school, didn't go to no high school... But after all that, she decided to get a doctorate in psychology. And she did.”
    “Whoa!!”
    “Yup. So that's my inspiration.”
    “Whoa,” I marveled. The things our mothers have done, often quietly, often hidden from view, for themselves or others. You change the world by being your best self. Did she know she would encourage her son so, and ripple out onto me and so many others? “That's the most inspiring thing I've heard in like a month!”
    “Ha! Thanks. Yeah, she the one.”
    “And to think about all the obstacles she musta had in her way, how they say it's harder to go to college as an adult, everything–”
    “And she did this with five kids at home, all strung out on drugs.”
    “Oh my gosh!”
    “They sent me home from the penitentiary.”
    “Okay she's strong. This woman... Just raising one kid is a straight up full time job by itself, but five! Plus challenges? And getting this degree, from square one?”
    “They sent me home from the penitentiary to be with her.”
    “You're awesome and she's awesome.”
    He looked at me, pausing and newly still. He said, “Man, I love you for that.”
    “Right back atcha, man. Love and respect.” Firm handshake.
    “My name's Michael.”
    “I'm Nathan.” 

    Speak to me not, O Muse, of the heroes we find in history books. Tell instead of the quiet giants who inspire this man and myself, a couple of streetwise youngsters in the urban night, who teach us to believe, be better than we thought we ever could be.

    The upward nod from his burly form as he stepped out, and more: he waved one last time, after he’d already left the bus. I saw it at the last second. I watched Michael waiting to cross the street, facing the other way but looking back at me to wave again. 

    A woman was standing next to him on the corner, waiting to cross as well. He struck up a conversation with her, full of the verve we’d made, passing on with a smile the appreciative respect and love that came so naturally to him, an echo of his mother’s best qualities.
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    The Wave Has Landed

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    Trigger warning.

    “Hello,” I said, not recognizing.
    He was incredulous. “You still drivin??!!!?”
    “You know it!!”
    “Ah was wonderin’, 'cause I ain't seen you. It's been a hot minute.”
    “Yeah, they had me on another route, it fit better with my schedule but I missed this one, man! I had to get back! It has life out here, you know, energy.”
    “Energy!”
    “You know what I mean?”
    “I do. I got it! You want it?”
    “Ha! Always. How's your night?”
    “Slow.”
    “Yeah. Monday.”
    “Yup.” He sighed. “Actually, well. Tell you what, man. Some dude done laid his hands on his wife, who is my best friend, and cut her too.”
    “Whaaat?”
    “Yeah. And she wasn't having none of it. She told his dumb ass what time it was and beat him down. And then he cut her! He took a knife out, you believe that bullshit? Talkin’ bout a woman here!!”
    “Oh no. That's just wrong. That's all kinds of wrong.” 
    “So that's what I got goin’ on tonight.” 
    “That's heavy duty.”
    “Yup. So I'm gon’ go find this fool and beat his ass without a knife. Any man put his hands on a woman ain't no muthafuckin' man!” 

    Time shifts differently in the ‘hood. Is it the nature of the moving parts out here? The pathways and limitations, stopgaps in education and opportunity? You see it in clothing choice and fashion. Here my friends on the bus are wearing what the cool kids in the ‘burbs donned fifteen years ago. There are outliers in either direction, of course, but overall you find less artifice. There are more elemental things to prioritize.

    You also find sociocultural movements trickling in at a slower rate. Lack of education and different uses of communications technology, along with divergent cultural concepts of noise tolerance and personal space can make the bus ride on this side of town a unique experience. 

    But Fourth-wave feminism has, thankfully, found its way here too. You knew it would; movements improve the world in stages. As psychologist Louise Fitzgerald says, every twenty years people seem to remember that sexual harassment exists... These ideas aren't new, but they're cycling around again, and hopefully they'll stick a little more each time. Supportive comments like the above now find their way into street conversation as often as the opposite, rather than being anomalous. I see it as a confirmation that a movement is truly a movement, undeniable and real. I used to listen to guys brag about how many white women they’d beaten up. Now I hear them reflect differently. 

    “You just can’t beat up women no more,” a man recently mused to his friend one evening. “Used to be, you'd beat ‘em up. Now, you cain’t. Iss a new era.”

    What struck me was the speaker didn’t have much of an opinion on the new norm, other than that he seemed entirely okay with following it. Like they were orders from on high, and now that they were standards, well, that’s what we’ll do now. Another fellow: “It’s the 21st century! Folks ain’t supposed to be smackin’ folks no more! It’s called respect!”

    Times have changed, and for the better. These are scary prejudices, but word is getting out, and it’s infiltrating the definitions of normal with pleasant subterfuge. Contemporary feminism isn’t just a preoccupation of the middle and upper class, as movements often are when they begin. It’s full-blooded, and has touched minds at all levels of society. The hard work done by folks during the Third wave is in full blooming echo now, as more people in more places than ever before acknowledge the rights of a larger percentage of humankind. We're getting somewhere, slowly.

    “Laying your hands” on your wife, as our friend above describes it, used to be legal. Now it isn’t just a prosecutable offense, it’s regularly recognized in the court of street opinion as a moral violation. No tribunal may know to stick up for the abused wife he mentions tonight, but he sure will.

    Because it’s important, and he knows it in his blood.

    ---

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    Helpers in the Night

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    The running joke in my head is, I just don’t know how to talk to the ladies! 

    I think of it when I have particularly awful or unsafe encounters on the bus, which in my experience have nearly always been with female passengers. Most of my worst nights on the road have involved challenges with severely unstable women; I imagine the opposite is true for my female colleagues. I’m also guessing it’s harder to be homeless and female rather than homeless and male, perhaps accounting for more extreme cases. Personally, I chalk my circumstance up to coincidence and find it unhealthy to do otherwise. 

    Regardless, anyone who thinks all women are angels has clearly never been on an elementary playground, gone to high school, or driven a city bus. This job has taught me in potent terms that no declarative statement on human behavior is ever true. No demographic fits into a box, or has a monopoly on good manners. It’s easier to just say:

    Everyone’s great, and everyone’s awful.

    You drive long enough with open eyes, and you’ll find a counterexample to whatever we've been taught to assume.     There are nice cops, despotic women, polite hoodlums, capable female professionals, snobby homeless people, safe Uber drivers, buff nerds, tender he-men, black people who don’t like sports, Asian people who are bad at math, compassionate and empathetic rich white people, responsible drug users, criminal angels and every other stereotype-busting attitude you could possibly imagine out here. 

    It’s a wide world, as they say. 

    Tonight a lone King County Sheriff was gamely doing his best to remove a passenger from my coach. He kept politely exhorting the young lady sprawled out across the front seats, telling her this was the last stop and so on. I’d tried the same to no avail earlier. She ululated in tongues, a primordial roar from a time before language, expressing anguish in its purest form. She periodically rose from a shapeless collection of sweatshirts and sagging sweatpants to assault the air, besieging him with profanities you know he won’t be repeating to his mother. 

    A couple had gathered outside the bus– a thirty-something pair, good-looking as models, perhaps young professionals out on the town for a night out. The woman, with straightened blonde hair and fashionable knee-high boots, held her fellow’s arm as they looked on, watching the proceedings. He had close-cropped dark hair and a fitted rainproof jacket. They took a step forward, catching the Sheriff’s eye; the man made a gesture with his hand, one I had not seen before. The Sheriff nodded, and the couple took a step back but continued watching.

    Now the woman inside leapt up with her arms flailing, her teeth bared and going for the officer’s neck. Her mouth stretched wide open with eyes squinted almost shut, giving the impression of a faceless collection of incisors, saliva flying and bellowing with vampiric abandon.

    Here is the man from outside already bounding in, his arms forceful and crooked at ready positions, completing a precision strike I was still trying to process as his steel-toed shoe intersected with her right calf, neatly reducing her to the ground without a sound in seconds flat.

    I thought, that’s combat training for sure.

    They didn’t know each other, but he’d communicated by signal beforehand: I’m here if you need me. 

    Together they carried her wrestling form outside, efficiently, avoiding her still-gnashing teeth. I stepped outside the bus also, hands in pockets and taking it all in. The blonde half of the professional duo who’d been watching approached me.

    “How are you,” she asked, with an easy smile.
    “Oh, pretty good. She was fine two hours ago,” I said, referring to our misbehaving friend. “But I guess we have our good moments, and our…”
    “Not so good ones?”
    “Exactly, not quite so good! How's the night for you?”
    “Pretty good,” she replied. “We're just visiting for the weekend.”
    “Oh, cool! Where from?”
    “Well, Washington. Just the other side of the state.”
    “Where all that great sunshine is!”
    “Yeah! It's a desert. We live in a desert.”
    “I love deserts. Do you like it out there?”
    “It has its good moments and it's not so good ones, I guess!”
    “Right on! Your man's awesome, by the way. I really appreciate you guys taking a second to check in on us and help out.”
    “Oh totally. No problem. My husband's with the police force over there.”
    “Oh okay. Cool!”
    “Yeah. It's like a brotherhood kind of a thing.”
    “Gotta look out for each other?”
    “Yeah!”
    “That's great. Props to him, to the both of you for taking the time.”
    “Oh, it's really no problem. So, do you have kids or anything?”

    She was so friendly. She had the ready welcoming charm I’ve found more often in small towns or the Midwest, where I’ve noticed a more prevalent tendency to take real time to help strangers. How wrong I had been to assume they were a couple of young hipster Seattleites looky-looing their way past a Sheriff working way too hard. No, they were skilled at the patient art of caring, of civic brotherhood and support. She was genuinely interested in making conversation, the two of us discussing child-rearing as the boys struggled with handcuffs.

    How little did I know. Another assumption checked off the list: a chic couple strolling through Chinatown dressed like supermodels maaaay sometimes stop everything they're doing and take time out of their evening to use highly specialized skills and help strangers out of physically dangerous situations!

    Just another day in the game of life.
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    Nathan Vass: NRFF Artist of the Month (Interview)

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    It's so much fun to be interviewed about stuff besides the coronavirus...

    More importantly, it's an honor to be recognized the New Renaissance Film Festival as their Artist of the Month, and a special treat to be interviewed by Anya Patel. I can't stress how gratifying it is to work with such a professional as her, who read up on me and my site in detail before preparing this interview– which allowed us to skip past the usual "so what inspired you to become an artist"-type introductory questions. Click the link below to dive deep on my film, cinema, the importance of strong female characters, recommendations for aspiring filmmakers, and a whole lot more!

    Read the full interview here (with clips, trailer, other video and photos!).

    ​Enjoy!
  • Published on

    Freedom From

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    “Here is really shitty,” she said.

    It was an appraisal of frankness I wouldn’t have expected given her appearance– older than my parents’ generation, possibly much older, with an accent hailing from somewhere far away– maybe one of those hidden countries, the kind we forget to remember. She seemed rich with unseen culture. I wondered what worlds she once daily knew, perhaps in Belarus, Moldova, the Baltics. We were heading up Third Avenue, approaching Pike Street. The view was an echo of New York City before the 90s cleanup– life in profusion, reduced to scraps and oozing with color and death.

    “Sometimes,” I replied. You know me; I can’t agree with such a statement outright.
    “Ha!”
    I like it out here. I met her halfway, saying, “Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad.” 

    She chuckled. Our comments sounded ridiculous looking around, surrounded as we were by sharp and putrid angles lurking in the shadows. But I think she caught the reason for my drift; I have to be out here, and I need my soul to survive. Bemoaning the state of things never helps. I said, “I have to look for the bright side, you know?” 
    She nodded wearily: “Yeah, it's true.”
    “It's how we stay sane.”
    “They're mostly harmless. These people.”
    “They're mostly harmless.” 
    “In my opinion,” she added. “They deserve better.”
    “They deserve better. I agree.”
    “It's just shitty. Amazon, what they have done. They say they give 500 million dollars, but where is it? I don't see it. I think it's corruption. In my opinion.”
    “I think so too! They've made life hard for everybody!”
    “I was going to make a donation. But I decided not to.”
    “That's good.”
    “There is so much corruption going on right now, this country.”
    “It's terrible!”
    She shook her head. “I think this country is corruption.” 
    “I think so too!”

    Her accent told of places and times where such thoughts were not allowed. Her sharing this was special. A gesture. Her next line, a farewell, was a wink:
    “I love this country!”
    “Ha! I love this country!”

    It was both a world-weary joke and a genuine expression, all at once. We do love this country. We who know of inhumanities abroad have the perspective to realize what freedom exists here. I thought of a young African immigrant who recently exclaimed to me, “Are you kidding me? This place is great! Here you can be who you want, how you want! Do you know how good you have it?”

    Then I thought of Churchill’s famous quip, and its reminder toward frame of reference: “Democracy’s the worst form of government. Except for all the other ones!”

    Yes, there are things intolerable in this place. But here we don’t have to express such by fearfully repeating, “I love this country.” She could say that to me not in self-preservation, but for a companionable chuckle. We ended on a note of humor, not dejection. Laughter keeps us closer to the light, gets us through life’s journey intact. You have to laugh.

    I watched her walk across the street, through the lingering mass on the corner– through, around, and completely unafraid.