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​*Trigger warning: discussions of street harassment and sexual assault.*

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A female friend of mine once got on my bus while being chased by a volatile and unstable man. He was big and tall. She wasn't. He yelled inarticulately.

She was waiting for a bus at a stop different than that of my route. There were other people around. This guy came up and started leering, shouting inches from her face and blubbering in tongues.

Most homeless people have friends. This guy doesn't have any. Because he's really, really really far gone. It doesn't matter who you are; you don't want to hang around this guy. When I see him about, he's always alone. He needed help a long time ago.

She ran away from the bus stop, missing her last bus home for the night. The ugliest part of this story is that there were plenty of other people waiting at that stop. They did nothing. She ran away and he ran after her. By incredible coincidence, my bus appeared and she ran onto it. I tried to close the doors quickly so he couldn't come running in after her. But I couldn't, because somebody at Metro decided the doors on all the new buses should close extra slowly. Once the bus doors are opened, they're programmed to stay open for two seconds before they close. A "safety" feature.

Because of that, he bounded easily in, right after her, and hounded her at the top of his lungs. He was American, but I couldn't understand a word. It was brain-swaddled jibberish. Was it hateful? Was it sexual? I'm actually not sure. But it was terrifying. 

I asked her if this man was bothering her. I needed her to confirm this verbally before intervening, because as a civil servant I represented Metro and I'm not supposed to be making assumptions about people based on appearance. She happened to be white, and he happened to be black. She did confirm it and I called for help, feeling a little useless; the man left before help could arrive.

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A 2018 study finds that 81 percent of women have experienced street harassment, and a 2015 report shows that nearly every woman has taken steps to avoid it, from choosing alternate modes of transport to changing jobs. Let's not even get started with rape. In the United States alone, there are 87,000 rapes a year.* That's a crime with lifelong trauma for every victim, occurring at a frequency to be measured not in months, days, or even minutes, but seconds. For sanity's sake I won't mention the astronomically, several-orders-of-magnitude more dire statistics for India or South Africa, two of the worst places to be a woman, ever. Compared to much of the rest of the world, we've got it good. But we've still got those 87,000 rapes. You know and I know almost every one of those cases is that of a man against a woman. 

There is the leading cause of death for pregnant women being murder by their male spouse. There are the statistics for Native American women (one in three get raped; nearly all incidents occurring on reservations are by non-Native men, who choose that venue so they can have legal immunity). I don't need to go further. You get the picture.

Shall we pretend these are isolated incidents? Shall we pretend violence isn't gendered?

Most men are good. Kindness exists across the spectrum. It isn't that most men are violent. It's that most violence is male. Guns are available to everyone, and yet 93 percent of murders are committed by... Well, you know the rest of that sentence. The continuum of online intimidation, workplace belittling, street harassment, domestic violence, assault, rape and murder... Let's at least admit there's a trend here, as regards which gender identification does all of those, almost all the time, to which other gender. 

We can start there. 

Let's acknowledge that street harassment, which is what I'm focusing on because this is a bus blog, is a bad thing, a form of control and violation of personhood, and should be addressed.

There are a lot of suggestions out there for what women should do to avoid getting harassed. Wear demure clothing. Avoid eye contact. Take a different route home. Avoid going out. 

There’s a problem with these well-meaning but ridiculous suggestions. You know where I'm going with this. Each assumes that the male impulse to destroy women is unchangeable. They take as a basic constant that men are evil, and here's how to deal with that.

I see things a little differently. I think it makes more sense to get men to stop assaulting than to teach women how to hide. How to censure and limit the quality of their lives.

The root of this problem isn't female. It's male. And problems are best solved at the root. I'm not writing this for my female readership. You ladies already know. This is old news to you. No, I'm writing to you, friend, you who are male and who, like many men, are not violent, respect women, and know that violation of personhood and the willful control of another is a bad thing. You're one of the good guys, and strangely, good men are hard to find. Because too often they stay in the shadows. When something's going down, something like the above, ugly and wrong, on your bus, at your job, outside the bar, on the train platform...

Intervene.

Men respect the opinions of other men. You have an unfair advantage women sadly don't get enough of. Use it. By involving yourself you also make him a minority in the equation; you've just turned it into two against one. You'll say, how you guys doing tonight. Is this guy bothering you? At this point, she won't answer, but he will. He'll tell you to mind your own business. You'll say, let's see what she thinks, and you'll ask her if she wants to be alone right now. Maybe she'll say yes. You'll say, see, it's nothing personal. She just wants to be alone. That’s one way to do it. But subtler can be even more effective: often you don’t have to say anything. Just offer your presence. Or be indirect. Ask him for directions. The time. Trust your gut. Research how to take a stand in ways that work for you (links below).

And with just that, you'll have started a trend. Everyone around you will have seen what you just did. They may even have joined in to help. Or they'll be inspired to follow your lead in the future. Or they'll think, wow. 

Good man. 

Am I trying to say that women can't solve this problem on their own? Of course not. I’m saying maybe we can all play a role. Harassment and worse of women is a problem for everyone. It concerns me, because I live in this society and I want the best for all its people. Second, if we say only women can solve this, we're right back at square one, reinforcing the notion that men aren't the problem. They can help themselves. They can be raised better, educated in a different light, taught to be in touch with their emotions, encouraged to respect women as equals. They can possibly be capable of growth or empathy. They're not just wild, apathetic monsters, and we don't have to tiptoe around them to figure this out.​

I believe that in the rape, abuse or harassment of a woman by a man, the problem is the man. And you solve problems by getting at the root. By giving women a voice, and letting the men and women who get it go to work. Education is the unsexy solution with the longest-term benefits here, and intervention is one way we can continue to emphasize what used to be commonplace: the notion that we should behave as a community, looking out for each other.

I write these words because of the times I’ve intervened and it worked, but more potently because of the times I wanted to and failed, because I was scared, unprepared, and ashamed that I lacked the resolve to do something. I’d like to get better. 

Let’s do this together.

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Further ideas for dealing with harassment from stopstreetharassment.org.
Resources: https://helpingsurvivors.org/

More detailed suggestions for bystanders and associated research, some of which I’ve appropriated for the post.
Suggestions for assertive responses when being harassed.
I can vouch for this self-defense class, taught by a friend of a friend in Rainier Valley. Master Ahn knows her stuff!

*The rape statistics stem from Rebecca Solnit’s 2014 essay collection, Men Explain Things to Me. 

Third in a three-part series. Part I here; Part II here. Above photo by Brittany Hammer.

I felt the charge in the air rising, sitting on the sidelines with my co-conspirators Jacqueline and Tom. Editor and designer and me, hiding in plain sight: we partners in crime, feeling the hush that lay underneath the noise, anticipatory, the blood-run high of knowing and not knowing all at once. Every moment of my not surveying the crowd was a decision; I knew you were there, wanted to talk to you, but I needed to let the swirling thoughts settle. 

I saw myself at sixteen, standing in line to talk to Michael Crichton. I was by far the youngest person there, and I remember being the only person he stood up and shook hands with. Why, I wondered. I'll never know. I had asked him about first and second-person voice in writing decisions. 

Seeing the book, my name and title, Tom's design, a thing we had built in private now on display, not once or twice but prominently, in key placements throughout the store, in the Bestsellers, the Staff Picks, in the window. All this, and I'm supposed to be poised enough to answer questions! 

The size of this crowd. The room, bulging to capacity. Being told Springsteen was just on this stage. Someone bringing out more chairs. The walls filling with standing figures. Don't think about it, Nathan, the enormity of the fact of their having came, don't think the thought, and let it throw you completely off the rails–

They came here for you. 

Don't think about that or you'll be frozen stiff, too grateful to speak. Stay focused. Turn it around: I came here for them. "It's a kind crowd," a passenger had told me the night before, when I shared my trepidatious anticipation of tonight. David; that was his name. There he was now, in the audience.

Things made sense as they make sense in dreams– too much and not enough, pleasantly, something other than logic organizing the magic of this night. How did every part of this happen, in this uncertain universe? We got the perfect parking spot, directly across from the main doors... on Capitol Hill in the evening. What? I miraculously got the day off, and almost didn't. How much of life is Just Barely, and we don't even know? 

At some point you have to stop thinking so much and just react, trusting yourself. The Summit was the shape of being up there with Tom, and sitting behind the desk afterwards, looking at that long line that once had me in it, waiting patiently to ask about first and second person. 

I've switched places.

The thought sent me reeling. In the age of cynicism we confuse pessimism with truth, and we become practiced at doubting reality when it is beautiful. Was this really happening? I felt outside of myself, the moment too surreal to process, too incredible. As I age I learn the world is more terrible, but also more beautiful, much more beautiful than I ever knew it could be. Let me not lose the magic of having eyes for beauty, goodness, the simple miracles I write about on this blog and the massive ones too, like tonight. 

I remember specific faces. My man Doug, representing in uniform. His mere presence was a gesture, giving truth to the time he'd spent driving clear down here from North Base. Others too from the furthest reaches of geography and time; Liz, who knew me when I was this tall, who encouraged me to explore bus driving in the first place. Here's a boy looking at his girlfriend, checking to make sure she's having a good time. Intensely beautiful people, attentive. Thoughtful expressions. A face here and there, jotting down notes, humbling me more than they know.

Jacqueline, the eagle-eyed editorial genius who knows my book better than anyone in the room, absorbed in the front sidelines. I looked at her and I looked at Tom, my co-collaborators in arms, and understood I was in the presence of giants. That these skilled craftspeople wanted to have anything to do with creating something with me? 

I noticed all this but it aside because questions and thoughts move faster than light, and you didn't come here to see me stumble. I prepared for this. I rode the high-wire wave of improvised concentration, public speaking that's directly engaged with a live audience: every second a gamble in the dark, only moreso.

Adrian and Angela, faces from long ago. The way we used to kick the soccer ball together, the fraught and dusty weekends of childhood. Did we know it would lead to this?

You had brown hair and a friendly name. What is it about a half-smile walking out the door, that contains such multitudes? Or the fellow with the checkerboard grey slacks and discerning eyes. Faces I wanted to talk with further, but for the buzzing chaos of the room and that line, the long line that felt like it still had me in it, the shy junior-high youngster who went to his favourite author events alone.

These were the highlights of the night from my view– not me. I was not the star of this show. The star of this show was an idea we all believed in.

That was why it felt like a summit, good and complete and real. In our troubled and ridiculous times, this dark, sharp-edged period that historians won't realize even we didn't understand... We came out together, came because we believed in something possible, exciting even, the idea that respect and love are more than just platitudes. That my work and art to a small degree give texture and example to our hopes, notice of a goodness we know exists, but sometimes need a reminder for how to see.

You got through to me. Thank you.

You remember the old Breda trolley bus. Dinosaur is an apt descriptor not just because they were old, but because they were gigantic. Majestic. Capable, unpredictable, steeped with the echoes and scuffed scratches of history, repositories of a thousand stories drifting up the boulevard.

A UW grad student was riding a loop on tonight's bus because he was writing an ethnography of the 7/49. Because if you were going to do an ethnography of a single route, well, what other route is there, besides perhaps the E Line/358? This is the crowning flagship of Seattle, diverse and multifaceted as no other line. He'd ridden other drivers' 7's too, and looked around on mine, marvelling.

First of all, he told me, yours is louder. People are talking to each other. And they're in good moods. And, they're sitting next to each other. Most of this trip was kids, late-night teenagers, and they were mostly bunched in the back sitting together, in total violation of the regular rule of sitting by yourself throughout the bus until every last empty seat pair is taken. 

Around the point of passing Martin Luther King, Jr. Way, we realized some of the girls were smoking. I got on the mic again, this time not to call a stop out but to tell them: "okay this is for my buddies in the back. We gotta put that light out. I'm just askin' you please, as a special favor, outta respect we can't be smokin' on the bus tonight. Thank you for working with me. I love you all..."

"We love you too!"

They laughed and complied, and we yelled a couple more thank you's and love you's. 
"Wow," said my friend. "People saying I love you? As a way to get them to stop smoking?? Only you could pull that one off..."

I chuckled. I remembered another driver telling me the best way to do this job is be yourself, and maximize whatever that is. I don't look big and strong. I look friendly and harmless. Yes, I work out, but no matter how much I always still look twelve. Such is my lot. So I take those things and run with them. What I can do is be the young-looking nice guy who's their friend. There are other ways that are just as viable, but this is what I can offer. Tonight, it works. 

Afterwards, he and I go back to chatting. I mention how I was recently in Italy, where smoking is more prevalent, but where they also have longer lifespans than us Americans.

It turns out he knew that as well, and more. I listened, fascinated. I remember the content more than his precise words, so I'm paraphrasing here, which I know is massively uncharacteristic for me (apologies, Adam!). This post is a little different from the rest,  but the material, I believe, is critical enough to warrant it:

"It's an interesting question. Why do some societies, some countries, have longer lifespans than others? What activities do longer-living societies perform that have a causal or at least a correlational effect on long-term health? One way is to look at societies within a country. Which culture group in the US do you think lives the longest?"

I said the first thing I thought of: "rich white people with easy access to good food and medical care."

"You would think so. I thought so. But it's actually the Latino community. And it isn't because their food is healthier. It isn't. It's not because they have great access to medical facilities. We know that's not true in this country. And it's not because where they live is generally safer or has less crime. Or like the jobs they have to work are easier on the body. These are very often, generally speaking, working class lives, often in less than ideal circumstances, that are not exactly what we would call comfortable. So. Why of all Americans, does the Latino community live the longest?"

I'm loving this. People nearby were starting to pay attention. A lot.

"Because they have the strongest sense of community. Inside the Latino community, within the Latino community, there's more equality than any other American community. The greater the equality is within a country's population, the longer the average lifespan. And the higher the inequality, the shorter the lifespan. And we all know which country has one of the highest levels of, quite possibly right now, the most inequality of anywhere."
"The United States."
"Exactly. It doesn't matter if you're a rich white guy who shops at Whole Foods and has great benefits. I thought that too, that the people at the top of a social hierarchy probably live the longest. But when you're the rich white guy and you walk outside and see a guy on the street with no legs, you're reminded, constantly in our society, you're reminded that you could become like that really pretty easily. You live with the thought that there is no safety net. What if you get fired from your job? Or require an expensive medical procedure? Nobody here is exempt from the fact that you could plunge into a very different and unsatisfying life state very fast.

"The people who are already there suffer because of what they're going through, and that affects their quality of life in obvious ways we can understand. But everyone else also suffers because they know they're living at the edge of a cliff, all the time, and there are reminders of it everywhere. It's not really a physical thing, or I should say not only a physical thing but a psychological thing. A black woman in New York City is ten times more likely to die giving birth than a white woman. No genetic basis for it. It's the psychological toll of being a black woman in New York City. It all adds up, the mental struggle, the psychological weight of living in an imbalanced society and feeling that inequality all the time.

"Whereas, in the Latino community, there's a strong sense of family. People take care of each other. If you lose your job, you know somebody will take you in and help you. Have you noticed how most homeless people, whether black or white, are usually American? How often do you see homeless or disabled Latino men in the street?"

I had to admit it. "Rarely. Basically never."

"Community. That community has a safety net. Surrogate family figures, friends, cousins, strangers. People who look out for you. You sleep differently at night when you know you have a safety net. And the thing is, this research has had a hard time becoming popular because you can't monetize it. It's not one of these easy solutions, like, you need to eat more tomatoes."
"Right."
"Or, all you have to do is buy olive oil."
"Totally. Like how the environmental movement didn't take off until they figured out how to turn it into an excuse for people to buy stuff."
"Exactly. This is different. It's intangible. And it's way, way more valuable. Which is why what you're doing out here on these buses is so cool."
"Hey. One person at a time, right?"
"One person at a time!"

Community. Equality. Creating more of it might just save our lives. 

Literally.

---

Further reading: The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, by Richard Wilkinson & Kate Pickett. Book preview here. Don't have time for a book? Maybe a Malcolm Gladwell book will do! The opening chapter to his Outliers explores the same material using different data.

This is second in a three-part series. Click here for part one.

There have been a few of us, out of UW Art School, who haven't been able stop creating on a large scale. You've heard of Laura Hamje, the painter, whose roadway landscapes (most recently her every-piece-sold show of viaduct windshield views) somehow, through their large scale and exterior textures, evoke the interior, unspoken landscape of the soul's eye, the child who questions being and time; or Serrah Russell, whose collage work beguiles in its delicate, evocative simplicity, calling to mind the formative definition of a thought: two discrete units linked, combining to form a third thing– an idea.

It is not a desire, this movement towards creating. It certainly isn't for the money (as I take another bite of canned beans and rice), not really career either, speaking for myself at least, but the throbbing lifeblood urgency of the need. It is a need, this thing, not a desire, nor hobby or interest. It is a goal where the goal is having a goal, where the final act is to be in the middle of a brushstroke, the light and potent space before a whisper; where you can translate your thoughts– your thoughts!– onto paper, wood, celluloid. To step, through being, outside of time. It is a malady of sorts, this need is, that I hope never to cure. 

We were teenagers fifteen years ago, these giants and I. Laura sitting over there, we freshmen in Studio Drawing, dabbing sumi ink on newsprint, carefully studying the light on vases and apples. Hauling our portfolios back to campus to finish our assignments late at night. Serrah at critique in Photo Theory, where the silence before a sentence carried as much meaning as the words themselves. I would stay overnight in the color darkroom alone, printing back and forth until the clock didn't exist. We didn't know the shape of the future. 

I stood bewildered at one of Serrah's shows some years later. The place was so packed it was difficult to move. What must that feel like, I wondered. To make the summit. I'll never know, I thought, and that's okay. But some years later the same thing would happen at my shows, where people told me they couldn't even make it past the door, but for the enthusiastic bodies. I would complete this film, then that one. There were the press appearances. The front page. The milestone of the twentieth show, then the thirtieth. Images selling at these prices. However..

I don't know why this author reading was the very first event which felt like I had touched the elusive summit. 

None of the others carried a sense of relief that sufficiently outweighed their various challenges. I distract myself during these things with trying to do a good job. I know how fickle this type of success is, how much less it means than... Well, you know. What we already have, and can so easily lose.

But I offer the words above in order to contextualize the next post. I write in an effort to suggest the whirl of thoughts I felt while sitting up there, on stage. I write this for the people who've asked me what it felt like, and I write it for myself because I have a habit of shutting out praise, deflecting compliments, resisting the actual in moments of extreme goodness directed at me. I do this to protect myself from being dependent on it, believing it in unhealthy ways (wouldn't you do the same?), but I do it too much. I've gotten so good at shutting out personal appreciation gifted to me. How do you think I stay humble, with all these accolades? Sane? But: the price is real. I cannot feel the joy I should be feeling at events like this. It always feels like it's happening to someone else.

Tonight was the first time I made a real effort to breathe.

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Click here for Part three!

Above photo by Brittany Hammer.

Now that was something.

How can I thank you?

I'm told there were 150 people there. That extra rows of chairs had to be brought in, that people stood, gladly, for an evening-length event measured not in minutes but hours... They travelled in from outside the city. They jotted down remarks of mine, as though what I was saying had some kind of value.

Do you know how much that means to me?

There are different types of truths. When people ask how something like this book came into existence, they don't really want to hear the nuts-and-bolts journey. Who emailed who, what day the idea began. No, it's the emotional journey we can best relate to; the trajectories of thought that led you toward a decision, where you were standing when the idea hit, how warm it was. The childhood that made you think this or that way. 

That's what I want to share here. I don't write a lot about myself on this blog. It only seems like I do. I tend to limit the discussion on myself to the literary equivalent of breadcrumbs, because I'm more interested in other people; but enough folks have asked about the book, and I owe you some details. Here goes.

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I was a reader long before I developed an interest in film, and of course long before I began driving buses. My father worked (and still does) at one of the country's only surviving book menderies. The book as something valuable, bodied, real. Literature. Taking care of things, of art: These were concepts before I knew what the word concept even meant. 

As an adolescent I worked as a page at King County Library System for six years (oddly, an ideal prep for bus driving– but we'll get to that in another post!). Again, books being the thing– and not just as an explanatory refuge of knowledge, but as the tactile living object. Things so worthwhile there was a facility dedicated entirely to preserving them, healing them, sending them back out into the world for me to shelve.

Those were the days of the real.

The internet existed, but not in a way you actually cared about; it wasn't useful yet, certainly no social media, not interesting enough to be a distraction or diversion. Checking movietimes meant poring over the newspaper, or calling the theatre and listening to that interminable voice message. When you wrote a paper for school, you went to the library and sleuthed for your information, pulling volumes off shelves and cross-referencing and indexing, books on books open to different chapters with your notes alongside. You remember. Cracking open an ancient encyclopedia and noting the smell of the inseam, the gentle stay of pages opened for the first time in who knows how many years. Life, a thing we experienced not just with sight, but all the senses!

It was into this environment my formative years were born. It was these textures, these places and memories that led me to place great value on books, and anything else that is tactile. Books, vinyl, film. Hipsters gravitate toward these same things because they do not have memories of them but secretly wish they did; I'm drawn because I do remember. Spoken conversation. The physicality of things, of engagement, greetings at the cash register, phones with a cord going to the wall, an envelope of new photos from the drugstore. 

Do you remember winding a cassette tape back up with your pinkie finger?

It isn't physical objects I'm trying to eulogize, but tactile engagement. I'm not saying this is better. I'm saying we dream in the landscapes built by our childhood. It's because of this background that I place much greater value on accomplishments that are tangible. The blog is a major accomplishment, I'm told, but it isn't tactile to me. I can't touch it. 

The book, on the other hand...

There are dreams you work toward hesitantly, making an effort not to picture the shape of their outcome, for fear of disappointing yourself. But you keep working away at them, if only to stave off the feeling of stagnation you'd have otherwise. I've wanted the blog to be a book, wished it could one day be a real live tome you could hold in your hands and touch, turn the pages, since, well, the beginning. 

But I didn't dare imagine.

I'd stand in the halls of this same bookstore, Elliott Bay, one of the great independent northwest bookstores, newly opened on Capitol Hill at the time, pulling off titles that vaguely compared to what I was trying to do. Essay collections, non-fiction short stories, books emphasizing optimism or urbanism, nothing quite what I had in mind but similar– pulling them down to see who the agent was in the acknowledgments, reaching out to them with a query of my own (determining the agent and editor of a book is something you can still, largely, only do in person). 

I went through the motions, querying agents, writing letters, writing drafts, assembling marketing plans and researching readership demographics. One agent in New York finally replied, asking to see my manuscript. I didn't have one, because non-fiction book proposals are normally presented before the book is written. What did I do? I put together a 300-page manuscript of stories in eighteen hours and sent it to him. Because I wanted this. I put the hours in. So many hours, agents, fevered late nights. But I never allowed myself to daydream; just work on what you can right now. And enjoy it. It never occurred to me to think about what my book would look like on those same Elliott Bay shelves, or what an author event might feel like. Don't set yourself up for that sort of pain, I thought, that disappointment! 

One day I'll write further about the magic of how this came together. It wasn't through backbreaking appeals to New York agents, as above, not flowing against the tide of life but with it; working with the good people right here, friends and artists who so graciously reached out, whose interest, efforts and enthusiasm I feel enormously humbled by. Will I ever know exactly how it came about? For now, the point is I never actually thought about this day happening, let alone what such an event would look like. I've just been working at it, keeping my head down for a long time. Forgive me this post and the two which will follow. 

This is me finally looking up, taking a look around.

---

That's the preamble. What did this thing feel like? Click here for the next post~

​Above photo by Brittany Hammer.

Enough about my book! I've spent enough energy telling you about my upcoming author reading tomorrow night (ahem, link here!!)...

Here are a few words of mine in Seattle Review of Books. They do a weekly series called "Whatcha Readin'?," in which they ask various luminaries what they've been, erm, reading. Here are my answers.

Hope to see you at a certain bookstore very soon!