Due to complex circumstances I shan't recount, I take the bus on Thursdays. I take it from the bus-stop just up the road to the bus-stop just up the road from my workplace. I let the driver continue driving, and I pay him a small sum of money for the privilege. The bus proves to be an excellent place to study human behaviour in minute detail, since there is nowhere to run to, and little else to do.
Most of the buses' inhabitants are clearly regulars, and have the traditional pre-defined and subliminally known heirachy, carved from days of repetative non-vocal social interaction so each person gets the seat they are most suited to.
The girl so stunning that everyone knows they haven't a hope and sits away from; the bloke with the one digit IQ; the loud kids; the businessman whose will to live has been eroded through 40 years of wage-slavery etc.
Those people who do the full journey terminus to terminus sit either at the back or the front. The back is filled so that newcomers to the bus can find a seat more promptly, and not bother with looking over people's heads to find the empty seats. The front is for the lazy or reticent who dont wish to endure the long walk past people to the seats at the back. It is worth noting that before the bus is full, the heirarchy corresponds almost perfectly with Martin Prince's observation that the opportunity for mischief increases in inverse proportion to the proximity to the authority figure, or simply, the bad kids sit at the back.
My stop is the half-way point on the journey both physically, and in the sense that here is where the bus becomes full. Generally I gain a seat on the way to work, although frequently it is the last one. It is worth, at this point, noting that "full" does not mean "every seat is taken" but "every double seat has [at least] one person occupying [at least] one half of it." By convention you do not sit next to someone on the bus unless you have to. But you knew all this. You want to hear about the man in the title.
He is also clearly a regular bus traveller. He gets on at some stop an unknown distance before me, and gets off the bus one stop after me. (I know this since there is only one stop after mine) Thus I get to observe the middle part of his journey during the entirety of my own. Outwardly he is unexceptional, what first drew my attention to him was when we had the bus with the exit door in the middle, and the signs saying as much: that the front door was for entering the bus, and all egresses should be performed via the 'rear' door, in the middle of the bus. The gentleman in question was sitting near to the front of the bus, and whenever someone passed him going forwards to disembark, he would quietly and subtly wag his finger much in the manner this little chap is: :nono:; and tut under his breath. I noticed this, because I adopt an air of quiet smugness on the bus, and gaze around with eyes as innocent as a Daoist monk wondering what everyone else is thinking. So as he did this strange ritual each time the bus stopped, I wondered why he was doing it. For none of the targets of his apparent irritation noticed him, or showed any sign that they noticed him, and indeed had they, I doubt whether it would have instigated any change in their behaviour. Moreover, it would have lent more weight to the theory that he was a supercilious cunt, a theory which already hangs heavy in the atmosphere of the bus, despite the fact that he never says a word to prove or disprove the conjecture, or even at all.
So I filed away my thoughts on the matter, and went back into my daze.
Today I was sitting near to the front, as is my way, and here was the man sitting a few seats away, calm and sedate, and looking pissed off as only he can do, and I took the opportunity to study him in some detail.
His appearances are somewhat simian in nature. He has a high forehead, a stubbly beard, short black hair on the top of his head, and the profile of disinterested silverback who's had his leaf-munching interrupted by a BBC film crew. But I find the best way to see a person is through their inner animal. This man is not a gorilla. Observe, he sits at the front of the bus, hands in lap, does not chew leaves, etc. I have concluded he is a bison. He has the general air of aloof disinterest, with the occasional glaring bout of inner rage. A feat only the bovine family has truly mastered. Yet he's hairy and wears a grey greatcoat, putting himself far beyond the stretch of domestic bovidae, and belongs in the lumberous plains-wandering variety.
And I glanced up at him every now and again to ponder why he is there and why he is pissed off with the world. I started with his location. He's on the bus. To quote the Simpsons once more: the bus, the ever-present friend of the poor and very poor alike. The elderly, the young, the housewives from one-car households, and the self-hinderingly eco-friendly. Maybe, I thought to myself, he can't drive, so gets the bus in order to commute and earn a living. He has no alternative, why should he punished for that? Or, I thought, maybe he can drive, but cannot afford to. But he has a big grey greatcoat, and he looks pissed-off enough to be affluent enough to run a car. Those who can't have an altogether different air or resignedness or simmering frustration. Here was a man who could and yet did not. Maybe, I came to in the end, he was self-hinderingly ecofriendly, and deliberately chose to use public transport so as to reduce the toxic leakage into the air of the town every day. if so I applaud him. I really must ask him though, for it seems to me that he detests the bus. He glowers at the youths, he frowns at every noise, every minor infraction of bus regulations, every jolt, loud headphones, and traffic mishap. He sits with the classic 'dont sit next to me, I'm a bastard' expression. He sits at the front, closer to the exit, awaiting his release. I am sad that I never see him embark or disembark. This is why I have never had occasion to hear him speak "Return to the town centre please", or saw his egress from the bus and it's rapidity or otherwise. You can tell a lot about people by the way they get on and off buses. Haste, determination, realisation that they just walked past the last seat not next to a smelly old pervert, etc.
What fascinates and scares me is that he is the very image of me, in 20 years time, me youth spent, my twilight years looming, should I have spent the intervening time not learning to drive, and not getting an interesting job. I see it in the faces of those around me. The soul-sucking joyless existence of the daily communal commute and the 8 hours of tedium, and the drudge home and the meal for one, and repeat. If I find myself in this state, I shall remember this man, and wonder. Then I'll buy a tent and go to Peru.
There's stuff I missed from this entry, there's stuff about how people know when you're looking at them (sorry Bus man); there's stuff about bus etiquette, perfected on the school coach; there's stuff about the boy who read one crime novel on the bus in the time it took me to read three; there's stuff about conversations, and bell-pinging timings, and the drudgery of modern life. But I think I said enough, and it's bedtime.
But I don't know whether this man on the bus dislikes the departure point, the journey, or the destination, but he does keep frowning. I hope he is happy. I should talk to him, but I won't, cos you don't on buses. You sit quietly, and wonder what the others are thinking.
Days Later...
I have a new theory. He's a man in a niche. He has been cast-out from most of society, through no fault of his own, but in the bus, he has found a place where he can sit and observe and preside and rule. The seat where he sits at the front, facing sideways into the aisle is somewhat higher than the other seats. It is a seat of power, just behind the driver, the seat from where rulings are dispensed and order is kept.
As we pulled out of the bus depot we stopped immediately at the traffic lights, and a woman walked up, as if to get on. He waved a wry, cheeky goodbye from his seat of power. I chuckled to myself.
On the bus today were a gaggle of 14 year old girls. I say gaggle, they resemble nothing more than geese as they bustle on, sit down, and honk all the way home. I wondered at the reaction from Bus Man. He seemed quite unaffected about the it in fact. His frown did not grow, but then neither did it recede. At least, not until the bus wheel ran over a traffic cone base, levering the top of the cone into the side of the bus with much volume.
The girls of course, squealed for about 5 minutes. Initially, the subject of my scrutiny seemed somewhat amused. He opened his mouth for the first time I recall, and displayed what I assume to be a grin, though not a simian one, for he revealed his teeth this time, and his eyes disagreed with the normal interpretation of simian teeth display. In short, he was grinning, not baring his teeth. For the next few minutes, he glanced all around him with a look of genuine, almost panicked concern for the welfare of the bus.
He loves the bus, he hates the people who travel on the bus, and yet he must travel on it.
I conjecture. I'll probably never know.
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