Sunday, February 3, 2008

A Short Distance Bus Ride

So it's late and I'm beat and I've been waiting out there in the cold for a bit, but eventually the Number 4 shows up and I climb on. The bus driver says, "Have you always had short hair?" I say, "Yes," which is, I guess, a lie. I don't know exactly why I lied, but I guess it had something to do with hoping to short-circuit the whole conversation.

The bus driver says, "You look like this girl who used to ride my bus, but she had long hair." So I look at the bus driver and he looks kind of familiar and I feel a little weird about lying on the hair front, which is more something I do to strangers on the street than to the bus driver, generally, so I say, "Actually, I guess I had long hair a couple of years ago." And he says, "Yeah, that could be what I'm thinking of."

And then he says, "Now you're walking on the wild side."

It was kind of a depressing thing to have your bus driver say to you.

Then two girls got on with a dog. Then some guys got on and started harassing the girls and barely, over my headphones, I could hear one girl going up to the bus driver and saying, "She's my girlfriend." I feel like any situation that requires you to explain your relationship status to the bus driver is probably one to be avoided, but I don't know. I don't know how they got the driver to let them bring the dog on the bus, for that matter.

2 comments:

Noko Marie said...

This story reminded me immediately of something linked to on Jezebel about a woman who got in trouble with a driver in the UK for being her boyfriend's pet on a leash. The driver kicked her off and she was indignant that her lifestyle wasn't being respected.

Link is here.

Several commenters at Jezebel pointed out that if you can't bring a pet on the bus anyway, what's she got to complain about?

Octopus Grigori said...

I would actually be invigorated if my bus driver were to tell me that I was walking on the wild side. Mostly he or she just tells me not to put all my quarters into the slot at the same time.