bad day for horses

i drove another charter on saturday. at the mention of a charter, my blood goes cold. at the mention of a charter to nyc especially during the xmas season, my blood freezes. driving a bus in manhattan is usually a thing that one can manage as long as you can keep the thoughts out of your mind that 6 million pedestrians will attempt to cross the street in front of you as you are turning and that the ubiquitous yellow cabs will swarm like flies around the bus in an attempt to be the first cab to drive six blocks in as many seconds during rush hour. you can fool yourself into thinking that this all a bad dream, because this does have the qualities of a bad dream and when i am driving i try to tell myself that tomorrow this will be all over and i will only think that i did this foolhardy thing.
driving wouldn't be too bad as i am accustomed to driving there now, but its the parking situation that is the real problem. i drove a two bus convoy with jerry, who is as mild as they come. a soft spoken and witty driver who i probably would have been friends with while in high school. jerry is pretty unfazed by it all and luckily gave up smoking before he began driving for our company. i'm still smoking as like many a soldier in a trench has found out that it can take the edge off of a stressful situation and give you a shot of adrenaline, curb appetite while you are waiting for your passengers to shop and take in a broadway show down near bryant park.
i have been in new york during xmas once before on foot and the feeling was of a great exodus of shell shocked people blindly feeling their way around a battlefield and now i was doing it with a bus. we got everyone off at 42nd and 6th amidst a convoy of mta and charter buses all trying to use this one block as a pickup and dropoff point. it went amazingly fast and we were on our way uptown to park in a supposed mecca for bus drivers, 53rd street. jerry said that many buses park along the street there and the cops don't bother them all that much, especially during the xmas season. the port authority was cut off to us as a temporary spot and this is what we had. we slowly wound our way to 53rd and along the way, jerry said that the first buses were already there. 53rd street is a one way, three lane street with prominent no parking signs, but we decided to stop there and not 'park,' but 'stand.' the signs didn't mention no standing and so we were good. the only string attached to this was that we were thus confined here for seven hours.
more buses made their way down the street like lumbering wooly mammoths looking for a relaxing stretch in a tar pit while taxi cabs zoomed down the street clearing the sides of the bus with maybe two or three inches clearance on either side and we sat. saturday was a bit brisk and a bus sitting in the shade of an apartment building soon cools down to the requisite temperature outside. i zipped up and took a nap, wishing for gloves and to wake up eventually and not freeze to death.
eventually i did. more buses had come. they parked in front of and i back of me and on the opposite side of the street making a neat little cocoon of aluminum, steel and rubber. in the course of waiting i got out and took a closer look at the parking situation. getting out now seemed like a disappearing dream. perhaps this was la brea after all and i was doomed to be frozen into place until the spring thaw.
jerry and i decided to leave with 15 minutes to spare to get back to bryant park and pick up our groups. before this happened, i discovered that the bus in front of me had a dead battery and wasn't going anywhere. obstacle number one. the three tour buses that i silently congratulated that morning on finding a tight row of spaces together on the opposite side of the street from me, were now a tight rock wall that i would have to maneuver around. obstacle number two. 53rd street is quaint and horsedrawn carriages decided to come out in the late afternoon on their way down to 11th ave. but one horse had had enough. a few hundred feet down 53rd is a hump in the road surface, maybe accidental and maybe a crude speed bump to slow the taxis down, but this one horse, fatigued and probably cold, slipped on it. his back legs went out on him and no one thought he would get back up. and there he was in the middle of 53rd blocking traffic, shivering and looking miserable. i had a picture in my mind of an nypd officer having to shoot him in the head like in an old cowboy flick. obstacle number three.
despite the absurdity of the situation (or maybe in fact of it...) i propelled the mammoth that was my bus out. and jerry and i drove down to 11th ave. traffic was heavier than we had anticipated and the traffic patrol had blocked off a number of streets in the seeming random fashion that they do. we had to improvise. travel further than we had anticipated and we were getting late. i stopped at a red light. two or three positions back and with jerry a block ahead of me. a clip clopping approached from my left. another carriage heading down the median of 11th. as he passed by me, his carriage caught on my left mirror. how a carriage that weighed a few hundred pounds pulled the mirror of a 20 ton bus askew was like asking how did a few cavemen bring down a mammoth... by repeated attempts that overwhelmed the larger creature. i had been feeling pretty good about not getting shooed out of my 53rd street spot and for finding an open spot to begin with and for getting out of it as easily as i had, but now a horse drawn carriage had nearly laid me low, pulling my mirror behind him and leaving me blind on my left.
i pulled over, tried to pull the mirror back into place. no go. it was bolted so soundly that i still couldn't figure out how it had moved so easily. jerry and i still had many blocks of traffic and turns to go before 42nd street. i drove as cautiously as i could, limited to about ten feet on the side of me that i could see. my esp worked and i navigated the invisible rear end of the bus to 42nd where adrenaline and anger allowed me to climb up on the bumper and throw my chest against the mirror and setting it right again. unfortunately, my finger was in the way at the time that the mirror let loose and here i was parked sloppily behind a traffic patrol car, passengers flooding back onto the bus and my finger dripping blood on the seat. i threw a bandaid on my bruised and bleeding finger and somehow the mammoth had survived. felt itself being pulled under by the suction, cut, bleeding, cold and pestered by little yellow cabs and bmw's and nearly gave up. but this mammoth made it home and avoided extinction to find out that it had to get up at 4am the next day to fight another fight.