I first saw him at 14th and Jackson, chatting with some NightWatch pals. It was 6:45, long before the 9pm entry time for that program. He was dressed like a dad fallen on hard times– grey sweatshirt underneath a dog-tired leather jacket, khakis and a small knit cap. Forty, African-American.

"Hey," he said when I opened the doors. "I need an Owl transfer."
"I'll give you 10:30."
"Yeah, but I need an Owl." He was standing ten feet away from the bus, and apparently expected me me to tear him a special-length transfer and walk out and hand it to him. In that moment he smacked to me of entitlement, of pride built on sand, the sort where one believes the world owes one something. Because I'm not always at my best, I let this rub me the wrong way.

I said, "I'll hook you up next time," already closing the doors.
"Okay," he said.

The next time I saw him, which was later that same night, the timing was such that everyone was getting Owl transfers, and so gave him one too.
"You're a man of your word," he exclaimed.
"I do what I can," I said. He was polite.

That was a week or so ago. Tonight he was there again, at Third and Main. He waited while I lowered the wheelchair ramp for another passenger. My thoughts meandered: I could choose to like him or dislike him. Which will make my nights easier? He's not going anywhere. I need to find something about this guy that I like.

With the ramp now stowed he stepped aboard with an eye on my transfers.
"Hey," I said. "What's your name?"
"My–? Tony. And yours?"
"Nathan. Good to know your name."

Something inside him clicked in that second. The mind is a universe, and worlds can change in a blink. He shook my hand for a second longer. "You know," he said, smiling in a way which somehow struck me as formative, like this was the first smile, not his first but ever, primordial, a reminder that all good things start with something small… could we still be in the early days of humanity, warring our way through problems which eons from now will be utterly solved, faded memories of strife difficult to imagine? 

"You know," he continued, "you're one of the, there's two best drivers, there's you and one other lady driver on the 36–"
​"I know who you're talkin' about! Wears makeup, hair like this, real friendly to everybody…"
"Man. You know everyone! Before I even described her, you know, and you also knew that other bad driver on the 14 we was–"
"Oh my goodness, I forgot we talked about that guy!" His memory is better than mine.
"But what I wanted to say was, is, about both you guys, is thank you for helping those who need help."
"It's an honor to serve. It's a great thing to serve. It's not something to look down on."
"Yeah, and a lotta people do. Thank you for not judging us, for not–"
"Well. I have family that used to be homeless."
"Oh!"
"So I can,"
"Go ahead."
"Well, the thing is, we're all the same. It's a phase. Like I'm sure you've done all kinds of other things in your life."
"Oh yeah!"
"And this is just another phase, hopefully one that'a end sooner rather than later."
"Yeah well, you know, my wife called me last month, the other month, hang on. What am I talkin' about, we spoke the day before yesterday. I been goin' through this surgery,"
"Oh, man! I hope it's been goin' well!"
"It has."
"Good."
"Her and me's been separated for a long time. Anyways she called me, mah wife, and said, 'come on over.'"
"No!"
"Yeah! Said she gonna pay for everything!"
"That sounds amazing!"
"Well, it's like I kinda don't know who to trust!"
"Well maybe, it's. I mean, there was a time when you guys were, when it was good. An' that was real, and maybe it's outta respect for that time."
"Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I hope so. I hope that's what it is." He held the thought for a beat, letting it settle in. He smiled.

I was thinking of Dawna. "You know," I reflected, "goin' back to that lady 36 driver. I respect her so much 'cause she's been able to keep up that attitude for so long. In spite of everything, all the stuff that happens, what's impressive to me is the amount of time. She just keeps doin' it."
"She's a blessing. You both are. God's blessing." 
"Oh, I don't know. What goes around comes around."
"It ain't about that. You got somethin', and you're givin' it out to everyone else." 
"I'm just so thankful to be here."

I didn't know what else to say. I thought of Dawna and drivers like her, and how they bring to life the great Nietzsche quote:

“It is not the strength, but the duration, of great sentiments that makes great men.”

Twenty-seven minutes into Sunday, but that's just for those counting at home. Broadway and East Pine is the center of the world for some, and here, where lights and faces streak through the slow-shutter filter of a thousand bustling doorways, it's still Saturday night. Listen to the clang of tongs on a concave surface, steam wafting out of industrial kitchen doorways; rich laughter from on high, the hearty, deep-throated kind, spilling out of a dance hall two floors above. Ancient wood and brick watch the world turn. A singing voice plays at half-speed, gravelly, nestled in an alley too dim and dank for touch. Young legs walk past, oblivious for now; they'll hear his tune in dreams.

The sidewalks and crosswalks and plazas and roadways are littered with good cheer and revelry, as the youth reach out for Dionysus, flailing for ecstasy and touch, belonging, urges we knew in the days before language. Here is an American male with a story, crossing Pine street at an amble, over the rainbow-painted crosswalk several lengths behind his friends. They toss their hair and adjust their skirts just so, with each minute trying themselves out for size, working toward a sharper conception of self. 
​
Is he downcast? Hard to call from this angle. A hipster would wear his sneakers, and his pants are fitted, riding the crossroads between casual and covetous; the grey sweatshirt compliments his chocolate skin, classy but no big deal. He's closing in on finishing out the crosswalk when one of the waiting cars honks at him impatiently, and honks again. The girls turn back to look. Is he angry? Is he–

And then he starts to dance. He stays in front of the angry car, look at that sweet backstep, his elbows angular and alive, hips rotating in from another planet: this is the face of a whole body smiling. 

The girls are loving it. Everyone does. The honking car made him the locus of attention, and he's bounced the energy around for all, flipping it away with a sprightly jolt of his shoulders. My bus is empty, but I laugh to myself in the dark, warm in the intersection's new flush. A hefty Waste Management truck drives in, turning into of my field of vision, the driver's face moving close to mine– and you know he feels it too. His white teeth contrast in the dimness, grinning abundant before he even saw me. Any drudgery, any burdensome weight of his job is gone, and for now it's just his beaming eye contact which acknowledges a common perspective, solidarity among us folks who drive heavy equipment around in circles. We're smiling at each other without bothering to think about it.

The things we get to see out here.

There's so much police, fire, and medical sprawled out everywhere you'd think it was the parking lot at Bellevue Psychiatric. This place looks like Willowbrook State in the eighties. The intersection is blocked at East Pine and Belmont, and we're not going anywhere fast. "Looks like we're gonna maybe be hangin' out here for a second," I inform the passengers, adding that this might be their best stop if they'd wanted Broadway up ahead. Parking brake with all doors open, heat turned up. 

I like standing up, going for walks, especially after lots of sitting, and given we'll be stuck for a while I step out of the bus and do so. I have a mild inclination to ask for a timeline from one of the officers on scene, that I might update my passengers, but they're distracted and busy. I'll do that later. For now I'm going to enjoy the night sky, and the rare pleasure of ambling around in the center of a blocked intersection. 

There's another 49 on the other side of the street, stalled as well. Still in the middle of the road, I amble over to the driver's side, and Jeremiah opens his operator window. We shake hands and talk cameras and photography. We chat it up as if we're in a hallway at someone's birthday party. Nevermind all the chaos surrounding; he has a film camera he's thinking about giving away, and we're absorbed in discussion about bodies and lenses, the value of developing passions in life. 

Then I notice a girl noticing me. "Listen Jeremiah, it was good talking," I say as I bid him farewell. She's sucking on a 4th of July pop, the patriotic colors glowing from the swirling blue and red police strobes. Blue eyes and thin, pale, that scattershot gaze which takes in everything; wavy hair and skin wrapped tightly around shapely cheekbones, that easy beauty the youth don't know how lucky they are to have. She's made up tonight, hint of a sparkle on her lashes, lips twinkling in the streetlight. She avoids eye contact, downcast, a wounded animal hiding behind the breezy exterior. That's Zoë.* 

"Zoë, hey!"
"Hey!"
"Gimme a hug!"
"Hey, whats goin' on over there?"
"I dunno. Must be somethin big, this type a response." There's a cocktail of Fire, Medic One, four Seattle Police trucks, with a King County Sheriff or two thrown in for appearances.
"Yeah."
I'm not that interested in calamitous details, though. I turn to her. "How are you?"
"Good. I saved someone's life today." Imagine her voice, husky but spry, riding the cusp between adolescent insouciance and genuine ardor. At some point in each of our lives we discover it's okay to be passionate about things.
"No way!" I exclaimed.
"Yeah, down by the convention center, this lady was overdosing and I was just walking by and I saw her and I gave her Narcan."**
"Oh my goodness,"
"Nobody was around, she was on the ground, and I hit her with the Narcan. It was fuckin' awesome, well not awesome, but you know,"
She's trying to sound cool and collected about it, but I'm totally blowing her cover with my enthusiasm. We balance each other out. "Oh yeah! Zoë, you're amazing! Saving people's lives! I'm so glad you just happened to be right where she was over there."
"And I just happened to have the Narcan too,"
"So crazy. You saved a life!"

A passenger strolls over. He'd said he'd go talk to the cops, ask them to move; their cars were only inches away from not blocking everything.
"Hey," he says to Zoë. I'm invisible to him, with her standing around. "I thought he was the bus driver." 
Zoë: "he is." 
Me: "how's it going? What'd they say?"
"Just some drunk guy, really high."
"Oh my goodness, that's it? Thanks for talkin' to them. I get kind of intimidated when there's a bunch of 'em."
Zoë smiles.
"Not really my crowd!" 
"They said they'd be outta here any second," he says. "Oh, there they go." 
"Right on. Sweet, let's do this. Thanks for talkin' to 'em."
"Yeah."

She and I, walking back to the bus, life around us curving back to normal.
"How are you, how's Northgate?" I'm returning to an earlier conversation. She's one of those street faces I encounter intermittently as the years turn over.
"It's good. I got this new charger. I thought I lost my charger, but my dad got me this portable one 'cause I'm always losing mine."
Luddite Nathan: "What? I didn't know they made portable chargers!"
"You serious?"
"Yeah! After you," I said at the bus doors during a pause in her talking.
"Oh I'm not getting on, I'm meeting someone."
"Okay. Hug." It just felt appropriate. "Stay strong," I whispered.
"You too."

They say you need to embrace someone for longer than thirty seconds for the pituitary gland to release oxytocin, the neuropeptide which reduces cortisol levels and promotes feelings of trust and bonding. It's what's released right after childbirth and makes mothers forget all the agonizing pain and actually love their child, and is the primary biological basis for positive social connection. I'm not sure the full thirty seconds is always necessary, though. The instant held, a half-second of connected stillness drifting outside of time, as sounds dimmed enough for a whisper to register. 

I realized afterwards that was a moment I hope never to forget. But why? I barely know this person. We talked about phone chargers. Why was it so meaningful? I drove up Broadway as oxytocin coursed through my hypothalamus, but that was the how, not the why. Science is great at explaining the former, but not so much the latter (have you ever noticed how kids get bored when we answer scientifically why the sky is blue? It's because in our answer we've only given them the how).

The world is my great love, I realized later. Not her, not particular age or demographic groups, nor any one person. I think I just love everybody, the whole collective.*** We all have fervent passions inside of us, and some of us are so good at channeling all that feeling into one person. I marvel and admire that, but I'm wired differently. That would for me be missing something huge. To turn away from these strangers whom I adore, in whom I see bits of myself, to be told I couldn't embrace the masses as I do, that would be akin to... well, cheating on the world! I once watched two men beating each other up in Pioneer Square, and was nearly brought to tears. You guys are my friends, I thought to myself. My human friends. You're so much better than that. 

--
*A friendly face who's been roaming the streets for only slightly less time than I've been driving the bus. You might recall her from this writeup on the 70. She's the girl sitting in the back.
**Naloxone, the opiate antidote.
***One of the reasons I love Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line, which unlike most films which are built around protagonists as individuals, considers humanity as a collective.

"Alright, Cloverdale is next," I told them, "by the Mini-Mart. And South Lake High School. Also, this bus continues up the hill, to Prentice. We're goin' to Prentice Street tonight."
"You make it sound good!" a voice behind me exclaimed. "Make me wanna to go up there!"
"I try to advertise it as best I can!"
"Hey, it's workin'! Iss better than so much of this…." She was referring to the automated announcements.
"Tryin' t' send out some of those positive vibes, you know?"
"We need that. Especially, especially on this line."
"Ah heard that," chimed in someone else from the peanut gallery.

As the crowd thinned, a young teen in a beanie, sweatshirt and backpack came forward, asking how long have I been driving, do I like the job. 
"How does it feel?" he inquired, after I'd told him I'd been at it eight years.
"It feels weird to say it, doesn't feel like it's been that long. I just feel like, I come in to work drive a bus, go home do somethin' else,"
"What's been your craziest day?"
"Oh man, I don't even know where to begin."
"Yeah but–"
"The craziest, I don't even know. So many things come to mind." Visions spring to the fore, quickly replacing each other– men attempting to destroy each other, death threats and late-night whispers, a ranting LSB-Dub, hot saliva on the inside pane of your glasses, kids in the back shoving an old man around, the careful pickup of used needles, police disposing of violent drunks by putting them on your bus, human waste from every orifice, words and smells and minds which don't make sense, glass breaking, a Navy Seal beating up the guy in the wheelchair….

"I don't even know," I said aloud. 

Those aren't the crazy things, though. The craziest thing is all of the thousands of times my living room of a bus, filled with its disparate, far-reaching collection of unacquainted lives, each in the middle of its own important drama, has been able to get along together, with no meaningful problems worth writing home about. That's what stuns me into storied awe, and reminds me of the great possibilities of our human family.

But that answer's not egregious enough. People want the deplorable, the heinous and insufferable. They want to wake up. ​He asked, "you ever been hit?"
"Me? No, not yet. Fingers crossed!"
"Good, man. I seen this driver get hit downtown, with a bottle."
"Aawwoohh, that's terrible!"
"Yeah,"
"But you know, you ever feel sometimes they bring it on themselves?"
"Exactly, he was being an asshole." Which doesn't in any way justify the assault, even if it might go some way toward explaining it.
"See, then I'm not surprised,"
"Some guy didn't have no fare, he said you better pay, then dude hits him."

"Man, he could've avoided that. For me, I say hey to everyone, how's it goin', and it kind of defuses the situation." He didn't seem like a youngster whose friends often say defuses, but he got it. People tend to be smarter than conversational circumstances allow them to reveal. 
He indicated his understanding by way of paraphrase: "Bring 'em down a notch."
"Exactly, sort of help folks feel relaxed, easy...." Acknowledged. "Right from the start. I try to set a positive tone, say hi to folks, we have a good time. Puttin' out that good energy, you know?"
"Iss da mindset. If we keep it positive, keep it open instead of, 'this is gonna suck,'"
"Exactly. Exactly! If bus driver comes to work says, 'I'm gonna have a shitty day,' he's gonna have a shitty day! But if we start off with an open mind, and just go into it with this good attitude,"
"'I'm gonna make this work,'"
"Yeah. I'm gonna do my part. And it don't matter what they do. I'm gonna do my part, try to be good, look for the best in people,"
"You should a motivational, you should be a youth mentor!"
"I would love to do that!"

The automatic voice got a word in edgewise, announcing "Sixty-second and Prentice," the next stop. "Prentice," howled the mentally unstable man seated nearby, embarking on a spoken-word poem low on substance but admirably high on rhyme. He was the only passenger besides the boy remaining, stepping out now, but not before leering in close to our boy and continuing with his rhyming monologue. I wish I could remember it. Our young friend leaned back a little, uncomfortable at what was clearly a new type of interaction. I laughed off the awkwardness and wished the man a good evening, joking after he left that he's always rhyming like that, how he needs to put out an album, except maybe somebody else ought to do the music.

I may have been joking, but he was feeling reflective. He readjusted his backpack, saying, "I always feel weird around homeless people. I could never imagine what it's like to be homeless."
"It sucks," I said. "I got friends who've been there."
"I could understand you start up a business, and it goes bankrupt. Or you lose your job and then your house. But what I don't get is dudes on the street, day after day asking for some coins so they could get some more alcohol."
"I know what you mean! I feel like there's two types of homeless, the 'Have-Nots' and the 'Will-Nots.' Some folks it's a genuine misfortune hits them, and now they're hustlin' for new jobs, workin' their way back up,"
"Yeah," he agreed. "That I get. But I don't get this whole standin' 'round street corner all day... it's like this. You give a Have-Not a thousand dollars and he'll come back at you with three thousand. You give a Will-Not a thousand dollars and he'll come back with a pair of Air Jordans and some True Religion jeans!"

That got a belly laugh from me. I couldn't have said it more succinctly myself. So perceptive, this unassuming young face on the nighttime stretches of Rainier. Did he realize the genius of what he was saying, in his appreciation of responsibility and easy recognition of contrasts many people fail to differentiate? We commiserated a little further, and then it was time for him to grab his bike and head home. "You should be a mentor for youth," he said again. "you're cool to talk to."
"You too!"

He got me thinking. I have more to say on the subject of responsibility and perception as it pertains to homelessness, but that's a post for another day. On the bus, whether as passenger or driver, there is a lot of time to think....