miscellaneous chaos... or is it?

jeez, its been a long week, i feel like i have been run down by a bus (pun intended...) and its been an awfully desultory experience. i was sent on a charter to yankee stadium along with phil, another regular driver who visits the stadium in the ole bronx often and apparently likes the thronging horde of people and vendors and buses and cars and semis and box vans all trying to do one thing at one time in one place that seems incredible as it really isn't plausible, but it happens anyways. my first time in the bronx and what happens? i get a parking ticket and scrape the top of the bus on a low hanging tree in a side street that wasn't meant for an influx of buses and cannot help but feel a little negative towards the driver who unwittingly, got me into this mess. first off, i am not even a yankees fan and probably wouldn't be even if i knew the difference between a knuckleball and a shortstop, but then if i were it may have intervened in the off duty cop wearing the yankees tshirt, who got the on duty to write me up the offending ticket. what would you do if you were accosted by a man walking by yelling obscenties at you while you were eating lunch on a parked bus in new york? probably wouldn't think twice about and that's almost what i did until i noticed his radio and started the bus, walked to the bus in front of me to ask the first driver what he thought and where we could go if it came to moving through this sea of traffic, when he looks back inside of two minutes and says hey, you better get back to your bus... and i get the first ticket, parking or moving or otherwise that i have ever received in my 17 years of driving... with a bus, but then again, i received my first tire blow out while i was driving a bus back there on the lie. so we move and he finds a spot, i start backing into the just big enough spot behind him and what do i have? the lowest leaning tree on the street located exactly in the middle of my parking spot that is exactly out of reach of my mirrors and just hanging low enough that i manage to hear a grinding scraping two foot long sound before i can react, hit the brakes, look at the panicked face of phil, hear the yelling from the bus drivers behind me, worry about the nyc traffic swooping around the street behind me and think, jeez, wasn't i lucky that we got these spots and that i managed to so deftly avoid that low hanging branch of the tree that was behind the tree in the middle of my bus? yep, all that the fact that i had to sit with the bus for six hours without ac and a pitable amount of water to drink and two dollars to my name on me feeling like a castaway on a desert island waiting for the next ship to come by...
but lest we think that its all been motor oil and roses along the way i have the experiences of seeing only the sorts of things that can be seen on the road or in the port authority. yesterday i notice on the thruway that a car bearing quebec license plates is motoring down the road and has a very large smiley faced bedecked bumper sticker. odd that, just two car lengths behind that car is another car this time with ontario plates but with the exact same bumper sticker... what are the odds? and what are the odds that you will see two nuns getting off a bus carrying many luggage bags, sleeping bags and yellow plastic blow up swimming rings strung around their necks? not that it wasn't odd enough to see one, but two? and then again, its not as though the port authority is not inhabited by those creatures with a few more eccentricites than we bus drivers... like the old asian man who walks around collecting newspaper. he picks one up, flicks through it, occasionally looking at something that garners his attention and then carefully folds the paper (or magazine) and places it with the twenty something pounds of newspaper that he already has bundled in a plastic bag with him. is there some bounty on recycling newspaper?

reflections on traffic

where oh where does everyone south of here go when the weekends roll around? it seems that if, with all of the traffic that heads north on friday and south on sunday that when you went to new york city or north new jersey that the streets would be deserted, times square devoid of people, ring on a doorbell and there is no car in the drive and the lights are out and maybe even the cat has taken off for the weekend driving, you become easily acquainted with traffic and the awe and the headaches that it can cause but for the idea that a higher spiritual calling is coming your way if you can approach it with a buddhist, monk-like way. its zen on four wheels (or in my case, eight wheels...) traffic, i read once in an article interviewing a traffic control 'expert,' for the california freeway system, traffic is an organic living thing, if such a metaphor can and well, easily be made for the unfeeling all patient beasts that we ride around in... traffic is a living and organic thing that moves like a snake. one section may well move and slowly, the tail will be brought up to the midsection and slow, then like a coiled muscles, the head will stretch and move, dragging along with it, the middle and tail again. its deciding where to speed up and where to slowly let everyone drop the gas pedal and three seconds later, the brakes as it slows and sppeds and slows and speeds and then slows again. repetitive. i've found a real meditative quality in the action. let the sighs come from the passengers mouths in back of you and enter a zone of white peaceful softness that tells you, like so much in life, take it easy, one inch at a time, or should i say, one mile marker at a time.

a jinx is a jinx is a jinx?

so do i believe in jinxes? not still so sure, but if id do believe in the thrid time is a charm, then i should be relatively free from further problems with bus driving, at least enopugh to last me for some years... so i had a brake fire last night about an hour from the end of my run and in my home town to boot. i pulled into the lot and started to let people off and it was then that i noticed the unmistakable and indescribable smell thyat can only be burning brakes with the accompanying smoke wafting from the aluminum wheel and more importantly, the amber coloured falmes peeping their tiny heads through the venting holes of the wheel. i immediately had visions of a six figure bus, an eleven year old one, yes, perhaps, but an eleven year old bus creating a slag heap of steel, glass, aluminum and rubber. in the last day of training class, we were told in vivid detail that a bus is essentially, a pile of oily rags and gasoline waiting for the proper spark to reduce it to a raging fifteen minute pyre. pshaw! nothing like it could ever happen to me, i am sure that we all individually thought, nothing like it could ever happen...
with the passengers exiting the bus, i strategically placed myself in front of the offending burning wheel. 'what's that smell?' most of them said. oh, nothing, just get off the bus and stand as far away as possible. with dispatch called and the rescue bus sent for us, i got the helpful advice from the dispatcher that perhaps, if the brake were hung up, that i could back the bus up some and unjam it. well, the result was just a bit more serious than the cause, but i appreciated the help. it was then that i discovered that i could not, for the life of me and the further life of the bus, stand on my head and peer under a dark seat cushion in order to undo a plastic buckle securing the fire extinguisher. that was nothing that we were ever taught in training. but then to dampen the excitement and seemingly just to spite me, the fire, which had been going along pretty well, decided to put itself out.
with this and the flat on the LIE and the exploding power steering pump on 40th street west, it seems to place me within a special category of unlucky, but lucky that it could have been worse. i am grateful that this was all pretty fun for a bit of drama, but i sure wish sometimes that my new career would become a bit more gentle.... boring, even... maybe i should have expected this when the garbled message came across from dispatch earlier in the day that i could park in the 'devil's lot.' now, i think that it was supposed to be 'double's lot,' but somehow the distinction was missed in the hit or miss walkie talkie radio communication that the company favours. but isn't this just a sign that truth mixed with a bit of imagination is always more interesting than fiction? i don't think that i could make this stuff up and if i could, i wouldn't be getting paid for it (until it becomes a book...)

apples and beers and coffees

and so it goes, this day without any peers, nor precedents. one day is totally unlike another. m is at home with me this morning , which is an unexpected little joy and diversion as she is usuall at work, far off in the land of telephone calls and i am sitting here trying to accomplish that which is made all the harder by the sound of my own thoughts buzzing around like a shit house fly in the lampshade of my head. but today, i have a diversion and a good one at that. m is here, because the telephone guy is hooking up the cable line for the line that, like a magic djinni, will pop in here and allow her to perform the work from home with only the cats and occasionally, when schedule allows, me as a distraction. bus driving is falling into a pleasant rut, a line run to nyc every day, smurf asking me to go to hoboken after a hearty, hello, young man! how are you?! i never tire of being called young man, which i consider to be a funny, but ironic misnomer. i am a young man, comparatively, but am i? its all in the mind and your age, as groucho marx once said, a man is only as old as the woman he feels. m comes in and i am a younger man. i remember the day that i realised that i was as old as my old man (another good, but not so apt phrasing when it comes to my dad, for he never seemed old...) when he bore me and brought me into this world. i was 27 and my dad was to be 54. i was his age when he had me and we seemed worlds apart and yet not so very far as our geneology and pedigrees would allow. i WAS him and he was me on that day and in so many ways our not at all parallel paths finally intersected in a nicely straight facts sort of way that emphasised the places that we had come from. it had been growing into me and did over those last five years how very much i look like him, think like him, laugh like him, drink the same beer and that the apple really hasn't fallen far from the tree. when i was in grade school, i read this poster that was hanging on the wall of our classroom, a quote by mark twain, 'when i was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. but when i got to be twenty-one, i was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.' i did not fully understand that until much later, but is it any wonder that my dad loved twain too?

the prisoner of the port authority

i'm a prisoner of the port authority. when i drive a bus there... and when haven't i? every day since i've begun being a regular driver, i've driven into nyc. and i am not even familiar with new york. i'm inexperienced. i just barely know what the five boroughs are and where to find central park. but being a man dressed in blue, wearing a tie and looking official with a leather holstered ticket puncher and ungainly company cell phone hanging from my waist, i must look official, like a sherriff's deputy in a small town, but a very large town this is, and as such a representative of the port authority, i've become information desk, tour guide and man to turn to when in distress. the other day, i was helping a couple off the bus, in new york their first time fvrom the midwest and they ask me how far times square is... what can i say? i guessed, not much farther than a couple of blocks i say, to be corrected by the next commuter off the bus, ' at least five or six blocks...' i let it go, i don't know and ironically i am being sent down there every day. how do i get to a d train? a blonde man with a heavy austrian accent asks me where do i go to go to airport? do you know? i simply look at him and respond, 'no,' because i don't know. i am the tourist here too. the only answer that i've felt qualified to answer has been, where can i throw this garbage? oh, right down there, turn right and walk thirty steps and you'll find the silver basket on the corner by by the information booth. you can't miss it. i learn by rote memorisation. go past the fish market with the sign in bright red block capital letters and turn left at the little diner on the corner with the fluorescents that i want to eat at one day. the port authority is m own little maze between 9th and 10th avenues and 40th to 42nd street, i think those are the addresses at least. at any momeent in the port authority i can be found haunting the edges of any hudson news looking for an overpriced cold drink or searching for more than the only two known men's rooms in all of the port authority. i drop off passengers refreshed from their two hour bus ride nap and walk, red eyed at 7am, 8am in the morning to find out that the dispatcher wants me to drop a bus off on the wash line in hoboken, new jersey and pick up another two at the garage, shuffle around the busses because the one that i've been told to bring back is in the back of the lot and get it back and take this one over to the hotel in secaucus. and when i get back i get a half hour off from the next set of errands. have fun and don't get lost. 30 minutes. a prisoner in the port authority. in thirty minutes i have time to open my lunch bag and get a sandwich out and walk out of the building and two blocks and then get back. a prisoner. one of these days i'll walk to the empire state building. i know that i can. i can see it. i can just see it around the confines of the port.

happy independence(?) day

so being a bus driver certainly frequently and almost invariably means working weekends while people who either don't own transportation (and this describes many, many people who live in the NYC area who were flocking to the port authority like lemmings casting themselves into the open arms of fate...) or don't want to deal with the traffic and than have to resort to calling their better halves or kids childish and churlish names when they realise that yes, indeed the traffic has stopped on 87... they can always sigh very loudly and obviously, complain about the air conditioning or the heat, the lumpy seats, the fact that the driver is letting the lexus SUV driver from new jersey who can't see the 11 foot tall bus 3 feet from his elbow pass him on the right instead of simply running him off the road. A man asked if "there was something that I could do..." about a whistling noise coming from somewhere on the roof. "It only does it when the bus is moving, he says and so I imagine saying, 'ok... how about this... you open the emergency hatch, right? get up on the seat and hoist yourself onto the top of the bus. don't worry, its a little bit hot, the aluminum may sear your bare skin just a little bit, but hold on, alright? ok, now i am going to get the bus up to about 70 and you look around for the source of the whistling and try to fix it.' but instead i tell him that its the wind whistling and no, there is nothing that I can do about it. all of the bare facts contained in my response but the disdain that i feel for his request put into the careless tone that I reply with.
i find it ironic (does that need to be said?) that i found myself bound to the bus from the first of july to the following monday by a seatbelt and schedule that just wouldn't quit. but then again so too, does labour day have that implied sense of irony for most of us are labouring on that day as well in the guise of a retail job that doesn't even lay out time and a half. hello and goodbye smurf told me at the port gate a minute and a half after i pulled up, just enough time to unload everyone and then drive back to kingston and again drive to nyc. hey, get there and drive on to oneonta, back in the seat, actually almost never having left and its back north, young man. not quite the battle cry of a generation of young tromped upon colonialists who were tired of getting told where to place their tax money on their tea. but then again, who knows, maybe i'll drink tea again until it runs from my pores and drive a charter to boston the next fourth of july, independence day.