The Bus Stop

Due to a spontaneous decision to attend a lecture on the latest Iranian election, I had no transport back to my house. My cell phone had died, so I could not call for a pick-up. I borrowed a cell phone and told my parents that they shouldn't worry - I was going to ride the bus home.

No sweat.

I headed over to the nearest bus stop and began to wait for my bus. There was a lady sitting there who was quite agitated. It seemed that a friend had invited her over for the weekend, but this lady decided she was not comfortable with the friend, and so she left his house. Unfortunately, she is legally blind and has no car with which to travel the two-hour-by freeway journey. She had no idea where to go and her abrasive manner scared the crap out of everyone who traveled past. She didn't want to walk anywhere, because she didn't know where the best place to go would be. On top of this, she was a recovering alcoholic and wanted something to drink. I decided to take the next bus up the road to another transfer stop.

This may have been a bad idea.

The next stop was considerably more crowded - at least one other person was there the entire time I was. Probably the most interesting person there was an old man. He was well-dressed, but had a problem with one of his eyeballs - it was twisted up. He had a voice the jabbered - a bit hard to understand and fairly easy to ignore. He was sweet to me, singing me this song, but he threatened other passengers with a pair of scissors that initially looked like a very small blade and a lighter, that he would occasionally turn on just to stare at it. He was probably drunk.

A man named Victor was seeming to look out for him. Victor would tell him to knock it off or, once, physically pulled him away from two college kids. He confided to me that the dude had a moderately wealthy family that hired him to do an intervention and that there were cameras all around the street that were put in place to show the crazy guy how bad he had been (or was). Victor told me that he was thinking of quitting - it was too stressful of a job. He asked me to go out with him sometime with no strings attached. I declined - citing my boyfriend and pulled out his picture. He agreed with me that said boyfriend was an idiot for shaving the beard. Eventually he left to go chase after his charge.

Besides these two, a fair amount of students used the bus stop. I met one dude who had graduated from my same high school 5 years before I did. Once it was established that we went to the same school, we chatted for a bit and he asked for my number. I declined - citing my boyfriend. End of conversation. Many students from the other college went by as well - two dudes had a pizza and were heading back to their apartment to eat it, and a group came down to grab a bunch of doughnuts. They were mostly chatty with one another and freaked out by the other people waiting for the bus.

I waited for about 2 hours total before realizing that the bus line I was waiting for had already done its last run for the day. I called my dad at 10 pm from a local store and asked for a ride home. This took 20 minutes. Moral of the story: Public transportation sucks when you actually want to get somewhere.