He wasn’t young, exactly, but he looked kind of like a young Miles Davis; or at least they shared the same round, deep-set eyes and small, sharp features.  Actually, with his knotty hair and loose clothes, he looked like a young Miles Davis if young Miles Davis had played THE BROTHER FROM ANOTHER PLANET. 

He carried a half-size spiral bound notebook, every page of which – front and back - was filled with his own intense ball-point cursive.  There was no problem with his grooming habits, but he did carry a strong and unusual scent that was both organic and somehow clinical.  It was a specific aroma I associated with people on the radical end of aggressively healthy lifestyle choices.  Was it apple vinegar? It might’ve been.  While it wasn’t necessarily unpleasant, it was unusual – like the way real vitamin tablets smell, or used to smell when they came in heavy brown glass bottles, and every bottle came from small dusty shops run by aging beatniks in the 70s.  Probably to him, you, me and pretty much everyone else smelled of old cheese and rotting meat.  That's what I'd heard the Japanese think we smell like, though apparently they’re too polite to mention it.

This guy, I never knew his name, but he was friendly, and we would say hello and sometimes make small talk mornings while we waited together for the Rapid bus west on Ventura Boulevard.  The last time I saw him, the 218 over the hill had been especially delayed and we were waiting to catch a later Rapid (they ran every several minutes that time of day).  I was certain I’d miss the connection to my last bus in, which ran far less frequently and would leave me with almost an hour's wait for the next one.  It would also make me about forty-five minutes late for work.  It didn’t even help that I knew the driver of that bus was usually ten minutes late on her schedule; as a rule, whenever I was running behind, she was on time.  Or early.

"Pretty late today, huh?"  I said to him.

"Yeah, it's five to eight now," he told me.

"Really?  Ah, I'm screwed then."

"Why’s that?"

I explained why as the Rapid pulled up and we boarded.

"Is your work close enough to walk to?"  He asked as we took seats.

"I wish," I said. "It's about a twenty-five minute drive on the bus."

"That's not so bad!"  He insisted.  "So you're twenty minutes late for work; that's not a big deal."  I didn’t follow his math, but that wasn’t important. 

"At my job, I doubt they'll care anyway," I shrugged.  The job or what anyone there might have to say about anything wasn’t a concern for me so much as was the threat of a sudden halt in my forward momentum.  Missing a bus is a small inconvenience, but it’s easy to get swept up in a combustible, straightjacket thrashing kind of anxiety when you’re kept from completing a simple task like getting to work on time.

"Man," he said, "That's nothing to be thinking about, being a little late for work!  That's small stuff.  You should be devoting your brain to thinking about real things.  Good things, things that will help you!  See, I want to make fifteen thousand dollars today.  And the job I'm in now, I can do it!

"I want to be a fashion designer, that’s my goal.  I use my brain for thinking about the things I want and making them happen.  Wealth!  Success!  When I'm waiting for the bus home on Laurel Canyon, I stand at the newsstand there and I look at the fashion magazines - the trade magazines - and I picture myself in them.  I see them talking about me, and I see my designs on the covers."  He held up his notebook.  "It's all right here; I write it all down, and I read it over and over again, so it's always the foremost thing on my mind.  Wealth!  Pleasure!  Happiness!  But I didn't always think like that.  For many years of my life, I didn't focus on the things I needed to; but that's the way I was raised, the way my parents taught me. 

"I don't blame my mother; she was just passing on what she had been taught.  But I don't want to share those same things with my children!  Wealth!  Satisfaction!  Achievement!  Those are the kinds of things I want them to learn from me, the kinds of ideas I want them to grow up hearing."

The bus reached my stop, and I stood to go.

“Well, good luck,” I told him.  “I hope you make your fifteen thousand dollars today at work.”

“Good luck to you!  And I will!”

I said goodbye and got off at Woodman.  At the stop, I saw all the usual people I rode in with every morning were still waiting there.  I took my place among them, and the driver pulled around the corner shortly after.  She was ten minutes late, as usual.

copyright,  © 2006 Wyatt Doyle

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