True Tales of Transportation

or

Why the Bus Sucks

The 42 ran over my Walkman this morning. You think I'm kidding? My headphones caught on one of the aluminum poles as I stepped out the back door, and the Walkman jumped from my coat pocket and skittered under the bus. I kneeled by the back tires to watch them roll over the one piece of electronica I can operate with confidence (play, stop, rewind). Why didn't I try to grab it before the bus started moving? Or at least alert the driver that he was about to make a grown woman, literally kneeling in the gutter, cry her I-don't-have-the-money-to-buy-a-new-one eyes out? Well, if you live in San Francisco and take public transportation, you know that MUNI awards drivers on a point system of psychological torture, and I was worth more than a hundred to the heartless man behind the wheel.

So I'm dreaming, but admit it: You're standing on Castro, wondering where in hell the 24 is, and you think to yourself, "What is it that makes the bus so late? Why have I been waiting for half an hour, when the ride I need takes twenty minutes? Is someone sleeping in, and where can I go to throw a brick through their window?" You also think to yourself, "Jenny (if your name is Jenny, or even Jennifer or Jane and people call you Jenny for short), this is not the fault of the driver. You are being staked by an inverted pyramid of circumstances, all of which have arrived at the same conclusion: You are being punished for anonymously launching a cup of beer at a boy who would not return your pathetic phone calls your senior year in college." (It landed right in his lap. I wasn't even aiming. I couldn't. He was on the other side of a partition. Blind luck. No one saw me do it. I walked away).

The mysterious nature of crowded buses arriving so late is second only to the negligence of certain drivers. I was taking a bus down Market Street on my way to the G-Spot on a Saturday night, and we stopped at the Civic Center. An older woman was having trouble mounting the steps, moving slowly enough that the driver closed the door behind her to take off before she had settled into a seat. But as soon as he tapped the gas, a pedestrian darted into the street, and the driver - I'll call him Satan - slammed on the brakes. The woman, who hadn't made it past the dollar-eater, hit the front window and fell back down the stairs into the door. And Satan drove on! With this old woman folded like a paper balloon in the bottom of his stairwell. "Not my fault, not my fault," was all he said, staring through the windshield. No one in the crowd of people between me and the woman offered to help, and as I continued to wonder whether anyone else would, a woman from the back of the bus shamed us all by running to the front to offer a hand.

Isolated incident? Sure. And not at all an accurate picture of all drivers in this city. Anyone who rides with Dr. Love on the F down Market knows that the microphones on electronic trains were meant for the crooning voice of this smiling, white-bearded man. He sings and banters with his passengers all night long, reminding them from time to time that "….you're riding with Dr. Looooove." And how many times have you seen passengers abuse drivers, yelling about their tax dollars when a hold-up is obviously not a driver's fault? As Dylan would say, "I think we oughta take some of these people, put 'em on a boat, and send 'em up to Bear Mountain for a picnic." Maybe the nasty riders and rotten drivers should be assigned their own Dante-inspired purgatory, riding on a bus together forever, the riders shouting insults and the drivers tapping the gas so that everyone in the back gets a stiff neck, but unable to stop for long enough to kill each other with their bare hands.

In the meantime, for Earth-bound pedestrians, one solution to the frustrations of where's-the-bus and it's-Satan-at-the-wheel-again is to buy a car. Yes, buy a car. Just, you know, drive to work, straight down, oh, Market Street at eight in the morning, and then park! Yes! Park your car in the same spot all day long, free of charge and without getting towed. Am I being facetious? (As an off-her-granny-rocker-stoned woman recently informed me, the world would be a better place if we had a winged bug called "facetious." She then demonstrated how you would kill it with a fly swatter, yelling, "I got your facetious!" ….I guess you weren't there. Any of you). But the parking issue is fodder for another column. Look out next week for True Tales of Trying to Park in the City, or How I Really Thought "Curbing Runaways" Had Something to Do with the Street Kids in the Haight.

Jenny Pritchett

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