People are squalid creatures. We live in microscopic filth and dead skin and nail shavings and tiny flecks of excrement and flatulent stinks and nose dribblings and vicious exhalations. Think of what lies on a bus seat: particles of human squalor, billions and billions of them.
And here I sit, wallowing. It is not being a very good day. It is not being a very good year. I am not getting much done. I do not feel like getting much done. I do not feel like much of anything. I stare blankly out the window, wishing I weren’t here, wishing I weren’t anywhere. It has recently become apparent that work is losing interest in me. A young—naturally—newbie has been promoted around me, and some of the key people aren’t speaking to me much. Like they’re fading me out. Don’t they stop to consider what that does to a person’s self-respect?
The bus stops at a corner. Trash covers the sidewalk in front of the bus shelter. Now, too, I notice that my clothes carry leftover deep-fryer stink from the donut-shop. I hate that—you’d think they’d be required to have proper ventilation. We’re losing our grip as a society. The bus starts, the squalor is left behind but the stink remains. I hate myself.
A man occupies the seat across from mine. I think he was there when I got on, but I’m not sure. He may have gotten on after me. You kind of lose track. He is a large man, almost unreasonably large, and he wears nylon outdoor pants with legs that detach at the knee so you can turn the pants into shorts. The seams between the lower and upper legs are open, revealing strips of white flesh and dark hair. He must have unzipped the legs after he got on the bus; otherwise, the lower legs would fall down around his feet. So, for some reason, he has unzipped them after he took his seat. To cool off, maybe—ventilate his legs? People do that: exercise this need to be health-conscious, even if it means making odd spectacles of ourselves. The sight makes me faintly nauseous. I don’t know why it should bother me so.
Downtown the other day there was a woman in a florid red dress wearing a white respirator mask. It’s mid-August and the air is smoky from forest fires in Canada. A pungent orange haze hangs over Seattle, making the city eerie and noir-ish, and I’ve seen a number of people wearing masks. But as she waited for a bus, this woman strode back and forth in her gaudy dress and her mask as if to invite comment and, possibly, erotic reaction. She was tall and buxom, her dark hair was wavy, her stance was bold—an odd but imposing spectacle. For a moment I wanted to see inside her mind, but then I became repulsed at the idea. I don’t care to see inside anyone else’s mind—the fountainhead of squalor. That’s a little too much like this bus seat.
The bus runs past a church and I see lying in an alcove a body wrapped in a white blanket. Beside it, a little brown stuffed bear stands watch. It’s a pathetic sight and it makes me offer a silent hope (not quite a prayer) that the person and the bear will make out all right.
The man across from me has begun to thump his foot on the floor. Thump, thump, thump. I say to myself, Is there a disco inside your head?I glance his way and see that he is larger than he really needs to be and wears not only pants with open slits but one of those Kangol hats with the pinched-down duckbill front that accentuates the bulbousness of the head. It’s a look that baffles me. His skin is pale, his hair is black and stringy. He gives off an aura of excess energy, even desperation. I wonder if he’s lonely, or somewhat untethered.
The thumping, the slit-legs, the aura of desperation cause me to wonder: Is he hitting on me? Sexual barriers are down all over, nowadays, and a man hitting on another man is not only no longer strange, but something to be expected. I’m just not interested.
We pass a vacant shopfront, and in it is another homeless person’s nest, a jumble of blankets and sleeping bags surrounded by refuse. A Styrofoam food container yawns open, spilling out Thai food, it looks like. It’s a sickening sight, and I wonder how this person can afford to be so wasteful. The squalor of humanity continues to gnaw at me. Cracks and creases, flaps and folds, farts and grunts and foot thumps—how do we ever find one another attractive? The light streams in the windows and shines on the gaps in the man’s pant-legs. Shadows alternate, light-dark, light-dark, white flesh-dark-white flesh-dark. I feel faintly nauseous. I wish the bus would get to my stop.
What is making me so uncomfortable right now? Old regrets gnawing at me, sharpened by a sudden spike in the aging process? Buried resentments boiling up, also sharpened by the bony hand of time? Seeing that little stuffed bear by the homeless person? I feel a clammy blanket of foreboding settling on me. I move my shoulders and shake my head to try to dislodge it, but it won’t budge. I hope something can help me out of this.
Oh, maybe this! A woman and a dog on a leash. The woman wears pink sandals and the dog wears pink booties, making me wonder what kind of life such a person has. Has she been successful or just lucky, or is she a victim of a failed relationship who lavishes all her love on the dog? No matter, it’s a droll sight, one that restores a little of my youthful sense of wonder. I wish it would never go away. Good luck, little dog!
He’s still thumping his foot. The versatility of his pants makes me think about legs and the things we ask them to do. Like dancing: a funny sort of ritual, one that makes me think of a show I saw once about large birds performing a mating dance—storks, I think. It seems strange that human beings should have anything in common with them, and yet: In 1965, as I was about to enter ninth grade, I received an invitation to the Saltmarsh dance class. My mother was elated. “Ooh, the Saltmarsh dance class!” The class was by invitation only, and only the children of the Seattle elite received them: white, Protestant, private school children. We were to wear dresses and jackets and ties. Fruit punch would be served. Okay, swell. What else did I have to do?
I happily attended the class, not thinking it was wimpy or stupid, like some boys would have. I was full of eagerness for assignation, full of hope. Ultimately, however, hope became part of a larger trend in my life, one that I did not see, then: failure. In three years, I never got beyond basic box step, and I never got a girl. That should have tipped me off.
All that effort I expended at the Saltmarsh dance class and in school and in between, all that energy pushing and straining in hopes of producing something more than thought fragments. You feel this energy in Seattle now, all the people and their mental energy, flailing, floundering, and so often failing. So much of it ending in squalor. The gray and the rain damp it all down, too, although seems like now the human force has tipped the balance and become overwhelming. The end result may be that this city and all its people are one day tipped into Puget Sound, leaving future generations to wonder at the eerie underwater ruins.
He is now moving his finger along on of the leg-openings. I think he might be putting his finger into the opening, but have no intention of looking any closer. Legs on a bus are always a potential issue, if not actual problem. They get in the way, and their postures and movements can be construed as sexual or threatening. I was on the bus once and two guys started giggling at me. One of them asked, “Why you legs so thin?” (They were Mexicans.) I grinned back, trying to be ingratiating, but then the guy said something rude to his friend and they giggled at me, so I went angrily to the driver and complained about being harassed, but the driver did nothing and I felt like a complete fool. Ever since, on the bus, I have thought about this, and thought about smashing their shins with my heavy engineer boots, then hauling them out of the seat and throwing them out the back door. That’s what I should have done, kick them hard with my skinny legs, which are really quite strong. I hope I see them again. That would be fun.
Light and dark continue to alternate, like prison bars or striped prison uniforms, light-dark, success-failure, age-youth, hope-despair. I realize I must not succumb to despair. The light is so nice and warm, the leaves on the trees are a wonderful green that erases everything else. I feel better—I feel good.
We pass another homeless man occupying his own filth, sitting on a small piece of cardboard. It’s probably his “anything helps” sign—even now, he strains to maintain a modicum of cleanliness, a thin cardboard barrier between “civilization,” however much waning, and chaos. Life is short, crude, and cruel. There are so many now, living on the streets, how many will there be in a hundred years? The thought is painful; the odds are high that we will exterminate ourselves before then. Every day, we creep closer to the edge, each day we lose patience, we lose stamina, we barely tolerate each other. “Love”—better to call it bare toleration.
He has pulled the bell cord for the next stop. I look away as he zips up the leg openings, stands quickly, and exits by the rear door. The bus sighs and moves on, the seat now empty. I’ll probably never see him again. I think about the pants with detachable legs, and wonder what it would be like to detach the legs themselves and let the body float free. I can’t imagine much good would come of that, except to give us new ways to create squalor. And then I realize: Why should I think that? Isn’t that just making squalor inevitable? I must not succumb to that way of thinking!
I make a resolution, right there, a bus resolution: I will not become a squalor-generator. I will do otherwise: envision a world in which we have the option of detaching ourselves from our legs and from the ground, and floating free into the sweet blue air, bumping into one another and laughing and creating a new, loving, joy-filled world. But I will not forsake legs. No, I hereby retain the option of rejoining them as needed. I love my legs, and would never leave them permanently. The vision first repels then thrills me. It’s almost real.
Several hours later I lie in bed and see a vision of my bus, now driven by a different driver. The bus passes a church, and in an alcove a figure lies wrapped in a brown blanket, a large brown dog beside it. The dog is just closing its eyes when it sees the bus. The dog raises its head, its legs quivering with the instinct to give chase, but the bus disappears and the dog sighs softly and goes back to sleep.
I wake up and know that next morning I will return to the church with the homeless person and the teddy bear and make sure they’re okay. I will say hello.
I think that would be good for both of us.