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Public Transportation, Private Dreams

You’d think, looking at the people in their shiny cars, that they’re each isolated in their private worlds, with their climate-control and their stereos. In a way, though, they’re not, because they’re steering their little jalopies or plush sedans they have to keep constantly alert to all the other big metal boxes shooting toward them at eighty miles per hour, veering, merging, and braking.

On the bus, we don’t have to pay attention to the other people or the other cars at all. If we want, we can watch them from above. Or, being high up, we can look out over them at the mountains, which are sometimes covered with a haze so that all you see is a shadow, the idea of mountains. We can look at the hills and flatlands dotted with sunset-colored stucco homes, and the twilight smog.

We can read, if we’re not prone to motion sickness. People read the novels of Raymond Chandler, books about computer programming, the free weekly, the Russian-language Los Angeles newspaper. They do crosswords in Arabic. Sometimes I pull out a tiny notebook and write, in English, Commuter Haiku:

lavender evening
backdrop to parking lot
Los Angeles view

jolt as heat nears lips
fear of sloshing, fear of stains
coffee on the bus

I engage in a little people-watching, and the people watch me back. Some of them I’m getting to know. I was reserved at first, because if you start talking to people in your daily routine and they turn out to be weirdoes, you still have to see them every day. But people have mostly turned out not to be weirdoes.
There’s Grace, who wears thick-rimmed funky glasses and bright, tight clothes on her small frame and is applying to law school; Elena, who is from Italy and works in the jewelry business; the bearded man whose name I don’t know, but who works for the Gas Company and sometimes has with him his small son, who likes to watch me, because when he smiles and makes faces I smile and make faces back. There’s the driver Tyrone. I sit in one of the front seats so I can chat with him about current events.

In the morning, there is a group of old men who gossip and argue in Arabic. One fingers worry beads, another speaks strongly and punctuates his speech with chops with his hand. A third wears crisp white shirts and carries a plastic gift bag adorned with a picture of a white, fuzzy, indeterminate cartoon creature and the slogan, “Love is all around me.”

There’s the handsome lawyer. He looks rather like a finer-featured, Indian-American Cary Grant. I sit across from him in the front, noting details of his masculine tailoring: silk tie, oxblood loafers, French cuffs with real cufflinks, platinum wedding band. I know some details about his life, too: that he works for the government, that he has a sister in San Francisco, that he wishes there were a sidewalk outside his house so his daughter could play safely. He appears in my life, briefly but regularly, a genial neighbor and an impossible fascination.

Southern California has often been credited with (or accused of) inventing, or at least epitomizing, various aspects and icons of American car culture: the freeway, the drive-in, the drive-through, the drive-by, the hot-rod, the suburb, sprawl, and so on. There is a certain thrill, and a certain mythology, to driving on the freeway, swooping up and down the ramps with the radio blaring a song about driving, which includes a lot of pop songs, spanning about half the oeuvre of the Beach Boys and several schools of hip-hop. These are the great themes of American pop culture: driving, rebellion, and love.

It’s a great Western icon - the car as symbol of freedom, of individuality, of motion. But often, now, it just means gridlock, and jangling nerves and a tense neck from navigating all the other individuals in their own cars, trying to beat traffic and not crash into anyone. On the bus, we have relinquished some of that personal space, and some control over the steering. Granted, I take a “commuter express” bus, which has more space and plusher seats than is standard, so I have to be careful about generalizing too much. But what unites us on the bus, even when we’re not talking (and conversation is usually quiet small talk), is that we can see and hear the other people on there, all dreaming our own dreams.

Los Angeles Downtown News
August 5, 2002