“I come here from Ecuador and I worked at the airport for nineteen years. Nineteen years from 1977 to 1996, and then they lay me off. Then in 1997 I get this job, driving buses. When I start, I know nothing about buses. But I learned. 

“I make as much money now, after eight years, as I did in 1986 at my old job at the airport.”

“So you’ve really been climbing your way back up to where you’d been.”

“Yes, I had to start all over again.”

“Where do you usually drive?”

“Downtown. I drive one of those big orange buses, sometimes three hundred people.”

“That’s a lot of people.”

“It is a lot of people. When you have more people, it’s more responsibility. But that means more money! You get maybe two dollars more an hour. I go where there’s the most money.”

“How many rotations do you do on that every day?”

“It’s two and a half hours up and it’s two and a half hours back; that’s the loop. I make three loops in a day, that’s ten hours. I work Monday through Thursday and that’s forty hours. So when they ask me to drive the 842 on a Friday, I say sure! It’s all overtime for me.”

“Do you like this run?”

“Sure. Sherman Oaks is nice. Ventura is nice. Very different from downtown.”

“Not so nice?”

“Some of it, no. You get all kind of people. People who live on the street.... You know, you get lots of crazy people. And kids, too. Kids like to—” He made a mouth with his hand and snapped it at me like it was a vicious dog.

“They get in your face.”

“Then they want to drink on your bus...” He shook his head.

“I used to drive one of the big buses in a bad area, on King and Western. But the people there...” He put out a hand and rocked it from side to side. “Sometimes they get on and they seem alright, but then…" He shook his head.

“One time this Muslim guy, he was praying on the bus—but not quietly. He was very loud. He even start singing!

“Next to him, he have this American guy. He have out his computer, he tap-tap-tap, working on his assignment. And then the Muslim guy start singing—loud! The American guy say, ‘Please sir, can you keep it down?’

“He didn’t like that! He say, ‘Just because you are American, you can talk to me like that???’ The American guy say, ‘You are sitting close to me and being very loud.’ You know, there’s thirty, forty...there’s a lot of people on the bus, you can’t act like it’s only your bus! But the other guy, he says he’s prejudiced. I tell him no, you’re wrong.” He frowned. “Things like that. Sometimes people are not very nice.

“People say when you too nice, it’s not good. But I believe that if you give out a positive energy”—he pronounced the “g” as a “y”—“guess what come back to you? Positive energy! I was a salesman for five years, as a side job. And I saw that if you smile at someone, they smile back at you.

“This is me,” I told him as we reached my stop. “Glad to meet you, Joe.”

“Glad to meet you.” He gave me a little wave.

I stepped down to the curb.

“It’s Friday, it’s a beautiful day,” he said, looking out through the windshield at the road ahead. “It feels like everything is gonna be easy today.” 

He closed the door of the bus and drove off.

Monday, William was back behind the wheel as usual.

“What happened to you Friday?” I asked him. “I thought they might have switched your schedule on you.”

“Nah. I was home, sick. Who drove the bus? Was it a woman, a black woman?”

“No, it was a guy. His name was Joe?”

“A Hispanic guy?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah, that’s Joe. I’ve known him for a long time.” He chuckled. “I’ll tell you a story about Joe. This is funny. 

“The first time he filled in on this line, he didn’t really know this area. And he was driving at night. He tells me he picked up this one lady, and she sat in the back seat—” He paused cautiously, taking inventory of the passengers. When he saw it was only two other men and me, he continued.

“...He says, it was unbelievable, this lady was sitting there with her legs open! He couldn’t stop staring, and she didn’t even notice. She just looked out the window the whole time with her legs spread. He said, ‘William, she had the biggest, fattest thing I ever seen!’

“I asked him, where did you pick her up? What stop was she at? He said Santa Monica and Harper. I said, Santa Monica and Harper? That’s in West Hollywood! He didn’t know about West Hollywood.

“I told him, ‘Joe, that wasn’t no pussy! That was nuts!’”

copyright,  © 2008 Wyatt Doyle

for information on Wyatt Doyle's collaboration with Stanley Jason Zappa, STOP REQUESTED, click here.