Long before my current government job as Project Manager Of Clip Art and Powerpoint Presentations Glutted With Cats Playing Banjos, I spent five years with this same governmental entity as a bus driver. I was an honest-to-god operator of 60 foot articulated tanks, loaded to the gills with unstable and intoxicated assholes, always driven with the goal of getting to the next bathroom, so fuck customer service, and fuck safety (but only as necessary). This was the best and worst job ever, and yes there are awesome stories, but the thing is, I’m fairly certain that my daily exposure to relentless craziness will have lifelong repercussions on my psyche because when you drive a city bus, you have a lot of pent-up rage. I mean, imagine all the shit a bus driver has to deal with, but for the most part, maybe 95% of the time, they DON’T freak out, and maybe only sometimes cry while driving (it was one time). And all that anger, all that energy it takes to NOT smash into some jerk who just cut you off, is instead pushed down deeper and gets smaller and tighter, where it burns with each injustice (as determined by the driver: judge and jury) until it’s like dark matter, something and nothing, and permeates into every aspect of your life, like when people are singing happy birthday in restaurants, which is already super irritating but when employed as a bus driver, it has powder-keg potential for me. In fact, Chad found it noteworthy that I did NOT freak out when this happened during dinner at our local Greek restaurant not too long after I quit this job.
LEE, YOUR LACK OF ANGER IS NOTABLE.
Thank you. I’m impressed too.
The good news is that these days my uncontrollable rage is limited to bus-only events (more or less). I know that these are not the normal “buses are annoying” feelings that everyone has, mostly because that’s what my therapist tells me. Yet, she is unable to answer my question: what is wrong with people who can’t, or won’t, just ride the bus like a human being? I mean, just… be human. Okay? See how low I’ve set the bar? Hitler was human, although I suspect that he would take it too far, enforcing “bus riding codes of conduct” by shooting unabiding riders dead on the spot (and as I write this, I don’t know if this is bad or not, and that makes me uncomfortable, and it’s kind of like that one time when I was returning to the bus base after a particularly fucked up day, and this was on the Eastside of the county which is a more suburban setting where there are little pockets of preserved nature in the most unsuspecting places, like within the boundaries of a bus base, where you will find about an acre of terrain, almost like a little canyon, and you think to yourself, not even jokingly, but seriously you think, “now, there’s a place to hide bodies,” except that this does NOT make you uncomfortable).
It’s been about 15 years since I drove the bus, and while some things still make me furious (wheelchairs, but please read on because I don’t mean the person), I am finding myself letting go of others. Of course, now that I’m a daily commuter, my anger has expanded to also encompass the rider’s experiences (which includes my silent criticism of the driver and the accompanying stink eye I give him when he brakes too hard). HOWEVER! I have yet to cross that line where it seems important to tell them what I think of their driving.
But we should probably back up to the wheelchair-thing, because if you are anything like my therapist, you just aren’t going to get this.
First, let me say, it’s not the disabled. I have zero issue with the folks that zip on, tie down their own chairs, and basically are quicker than the ambulatory fool who has to stop and ask me a question about who-the-fuck-knows-what while holding up the rest of the passengers waiting to get on, and preventing me from getting to my final destination as quickly as possible where I can finally, finally pee, so shut up and sit down. And it’s not even the people who can’t tie themselves down. In fact, it’s not the disabled at all. It’s the folks who find Harborview emergency-room wheelchairs abandoned downtown (because first, someone decided to take a wheelchair off the hospital grounds, probably while out on a smoke break, and then second, decided to just leave it on a city street because they were “done” with it. Or they sobered up. Either scenario), and turns it into their mobile living quarters and/or more likely, the best tool at their disposal when really fucking drunk on the streets (actually, it does keep drunk folks from falling down and hurting themselves, so maybe this is a good idea?). But also, don’t think that I’m a hater of our drunken townsfolk; I drove what is affectionately called the “drunk van” —another government job, by the way— driving around Seattle at all hours to pick up the intoxicated and take them to the sobering center where they could safely sober-ish up.
So, here’s how “The Drunk and the Wheelchair” would play out: When I was driving, Seattle had a “Ride Free” zone downtown, to promote commerce, I suppose, but actually it just created a free shuttle to get from one source of alcohol (Belltown, a neighborhood full of bars and unsavory folks, like hipsters), through the downtown business district (douche bags in ties), to another source of alcohol (Pioneer Square, full of bars and unsavory folks, like entire fraternities). And sure, there were the riders who got on with the intent of continuing out of the city and to their home at the end of the line. The rest of them, though, were either white, male, employed (and therefore privileged), jerks; or they were alcoholics who were most likely not white, underserved and underrepresented in society at large, therefore unhealthy, unstable, and without a home. And to be honest, I preferred the latter because these were usually the nicest riders (or, the absolute worst riders–there is no in-between with this population), UNLESS THEY HAD A WHEELCHAIR.
Here’s where I get to say that “I have a friend who is black. And gay;” because when I was a teen, I had a friend in a chair. He was wonderful. He looked like Anthony Kiedis from Red Hot Chili Peppers, except you know, shorter. I loved him for the knife stowed in his boot that he used to frighten children, and because he was always willing to help us steal shit (much easier to scoot through metal detectors and also, who is going to harass a young kid in a wheelchair?). He hated the bus, but we were limited in how we could get around back then (even worse was trying to shop: elevator doors would open, a crowd of able-bodied folks stood and stared at us, then the doors closed, and we kept waiting. I mean, I don’t want to assume that all of them were able-bodied, I can’t necessarily tell what’s wrong with everyone, but seriously, some of them should have gotten the fuck off and taken the escalator. But I digress).
THIS IS NOT THE PERSON I’M TALKING ABOUT.
I’m talking about the drunk person, who is actually able-bodied and therefore unskilled at using a wheelchair and has a shit-hard time figuring out how to work the chair and get onto the ramp, then onto the bus, then wheel backward into the tie-down area. Part of our driver training included attempting to do this for ourselves, like a little empathy training, and you know what? It’s not easy. But okay, this person gets on, and after rolling backward and into someone’s leg, then forward to try again, then backward and over someone’s toes (passengers in the front seats now pulling their legs under them on the seat to stay out of the way), then forward to readjust, they finally jockey their way into the tie-down area WHERE THEY STAND UP AND WALK TO A SEAT. Because they don’t need the wheelchair. Goddamnit. And then? The kicker? THEY GET OFF AT THE NEXT STOP. Rolling down the hill to the next stop would have been faster, the next stop being randomly chosen for no reason other than being, you know, another stop.
But it’s so much more than that.
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Success! (I assume) |
First of all, they roll up to the stop as if riding the bus was an afterthought (which it clearly was) just when I’m about to leave the loading zone, and this makes me mad because you don’t want MY bus route specifically; you want ANY bus route. FINE. Now I’m obligated to pick you up because if I don’t, some well-meaning FOOL rider will call in and complain about me, even though every bus that comes to this stop will follow the exact same route through the city so really, you could just wait because, oh look, there’s five more buses behind me, and also because they really don’t have a destination, they are just bored. Then, because this was totally unexpected, I don’t have a chance to throw on my four-way flashers and alert drivers pulling in behind me that I’m not going anywhere– stay back! and now we have multiple buses stacking up and unable to move. All held hostage by one person.
Next, there’s the wheelchair lift. When I started, Metro was phasing out the last of their old-school inaccessible buses. These monsters were designed to be driven by hulking men, which meant that for me to stop the bus, I had to stand up on the brakes. The same hulking men were no doubt also the designers of the bus, which required that all riders could climb stairs– excluding not just wheelchairs, but the elderly and the infirm and people like me who are not so good at climbing/ staying upright. In addition to the lack of a lift, there was also a railing down the middle of the stairwell making the entry way that much harder to access. Drivers of those buses who came across people unable to use the stairs couldn’t leave the stop until they were cleared by the control tower, who they just called to alert about the soon-to-be abandoned person in a wheelchair. Worse, I suppose, were the folks who were willing to risk falling just to avoid the inconvenience–not to mention the embarrassment– of having to wait for someone to come get you (actually, you just waited until a bus that had a lift came by. They didn’t actually send someone out to get you).
The new buses are awesome because they are built with curb-level entrances– no stairs! The lift is more like a castle door that flops over a moat, so if it gets stuck, the driver can manually flip it over and allow the wheelchair access). But that’s not the model I drove: those buses still had the stairwell, but from underneath the bus came this slow moving ramp, which would in the best circumstances clear the curb, and allow the wheelchair to roll on. Then a little flap would raise in the back, preventing the chair from sliding off the lift as it is raised to the passenger level. There were SO many opportunities for these piece-of-shit lifts to get stuck: the lift didn’t clear the curb and got stuck; the lift is stuck in mid-air, maybe with someone on it, maybe not; the lift won’t slide all the way back under the bus, and even if it’s only an inch, the bus will not move with the lift “deployed.”
Seeing a wheelchair waiting at the next stop was not necessarily enough to cause me anger; the discerning driver (myself) could usually tell what kind of wheelchair stop this would be–one minute or ten, barring any unexpected malfunctions (although it was almost worse if you misjudged the rider’s capabilities). I had the wheelchair load/unload down pat. There’s timing involved to get ambulatory folks on and off without them freaking out about the wheelchair, and moving people out of the wheelchair-accessible seats (no one wants to move), tying down the chair and getting back on the road. And this process is so much smoother when the person is a seasoned bus rider. They know what to do, what to expect, how to help, or how to stay out of the way. And I loved it when we pulled this off together! I loved giving smug looks to the passengers who were huffing and rolling eyes and groaning when they saw the chair approach the bus. HAH! FUCK YOU AND YOUR WORKING LEGS.
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Here’s a depressing shot of a broken lift and waiting passenger |
But the bottom line, always the bottom line in bus-driving stories, was that if you only had ten minutes at the end of the route to find a bathroom, and the wheelchair took 15 minutes, well, you get angry. And there is no way to explain this to someone who hasn’t been a bus driver without sounding like a real asshole.