Another thing that wasn’t funny was taking the train from North Portland to downtown every day. And then, once I got there, having to wait for a bus to take me to John’s Landing, where I work in a fish house, tending bar. It took me an hour and a half, with the layover and all the waiting. The busses never ran on time. They were either early or way late. The trains would break down, or there’d be a car stuck on the tracks and some drunk person behind the wheel screaming, "Oh shit!" so you’d miss your connection downtown.
You’d be stuck there waiting, and waiting, and waiting.
I would see some funny shit. Annoying shit, too, like people talking non-stop on their cell phones REALLY LOUD about horrific personal stuff, or just plain boring stuff, or people begging change and everybody pretending they didn’t exist, the way the scrolling ads and surveillance cameras everywhere didn't exist.
I'd pretend, too, most of the time.
There was a lot not to see out there.
It's worse now.
But some of it was laugh-out-loud, still is.
Middle-aged people in florescent superhero tights, on their bikes—they're way up the list—tourists waiting in long lines for donuts, Greenpeace people shoving clipboards at you, Save the Children people, Animal Rights people.
And everywhere, people taking pictures of themselves, posting who, what and where, and clicking "I like this."
There was this one guy I would see all the time on the bus mall. He looked pretty normal from distance: blue jeans and a tucked-in, white collared work shirt, belt cinched tight, kind of skinny, a clipboard in his hand. Always that same outfit, always with a clipboard and a pen—many pens. I figured he was working for the city, for Tri-Met or DEQ or something, maybe a planning committee, a livability study of this one particular spot downtown. He'd be crouched there on the sidewalk every day, writing shit down, all intent and focused, just writing away, recording information, very serious about it, like it was life or death, this thing he was doing. Important business, so important you wouldn’t know anything about it, being a civilian and whatnot. You’d have no idea. La la la, move along you clueless private sector people...
And you just figured he was working.
But when you got up close, when you passed him and looked over his shoulder, you could see he had pages and pages of numbers written down, on his clipboard, and in yellow legal pads spread out in small piles all around him—IMPORTANT BUSINESS PAPERS—and the handwriting was all wrong somehow, really strangled and strange. Then you noticed his face, all the worry-lines there, and you noticed his hair, matted and shot through with gray, pasted to his forehead like fingers, with his hands trembling above the clipboard, and how frantic he was not to miss anything.
I made a point of peeking over his shoulder every day.
I finally figured out it was the buses he was recording—arrival and departure times for all the buses, trains, streetcars.
That's what those numbers were: lines, times...
One day I saw him look really quickly into the sky, then back to earth so he wouldn’t miss any busses or trains arriving or departing or just zooming by not even bothering to pick people up—and there was a plane up there, way up there, real tiny, with a white tail trailing behind it, and two buses rolling towards us, and a train on the way.
And I thought: "Don't."
And I thought: "You poor bastard, what have your demons done to you?"
Then I stepped around him, the way you step around broken glass or someone with facial tattoos.
