ChronoTech

I don’t have a car. This is a normal state of affairs. I’m a college student, and to be honest, I live close enough to school that I don’t really need one.

Something happened on Saturday that is making me want to rethink that position. In ‘burque, we have a express bus service called Rapid Ride. On the front of each of these buses, theirs a bike rack so that you can take your bike with you when you ride the bus. It’s a great thing. So I ride my bike to the bus stop, wait for the bus, inform the old homeless dude that, no, he cannot borrow my bike, and get on the bus when it gets there.

I sit down on one of the benches, and immediately in front of me, is sitting a really sad excuse for a human being. This woman might actually be younger than me, but she looks like she’s forty going on dead. She’s wearing this skimpy shirt that is several sizes too small for her. She’s got this crazed look in her eyes, and her bag is overflowing with random crap. Upon closer inspection, it would appear that, yes, those are crack pipe burns on her fingers, and I really don’t want to know what that sore in the corner of her mouth is. She doesn’t smell too great either, but it’s not an overwhelming, make you want to puke smell, so I’ll give her that much. This alone is not a problem. She’s not talking to me, and with my headphones on, I can pretty much ignore her all the way there.

Except I can’t. About fifteen seconds after the bus starts moving she stands up, walks straight past the yellow line just behind the drivers seat (the one with the sign next to it that says in big red letters, “No Passengers Past this Point while the Bus is in Motion”) and starts yapping to the bus driver. This annoys me somewhat, not because I’m actually afraid of getting hurt in accident or anything like that, but because if he gets distracted and rear-ends someone, my bike, which is very likely to take the full brunt of any collision.

Then she starts caressing his arm.

What the hell? How the hell could this bus driver be willing to put up with this? The answer is forthcoming, but bear with me a bit.

So we cruise up Central Ave, lurching each half mile between bus stops in a way that feels positively glacial to me. People get on and off. The woman talking to bus driver pays no attention to this, and resolute continues to caress the guys arm while getting in people’s way.

A little background real quick. The Rapid Ride bus usually goes up Central to Wyoming, turns left onto Wyoming, and then another left onto the freeway on it’s way to the Uptown Park & Ride station.

As we’re crossing the intersection of Lomas and Wyoming, I begin to wonder when the driver is planning to move over to the left so he can get on the freeway. He starts way too late, and is forced to continue on Wyoming. OK, fine. Except that when he misses the turn for the freeway, he lurches the bus all the way back over to the right lane and nearly sideswipes a car. This is not normal bus driver behavior. I look behind me to see the other passengers reactions. This is when I realize that there are no other passengers, and now the bus driver is weaving all over Wyoming Blvd. This is understandably disconcerting to me.

It gets even more disconcerting when I notice that the creepy woman is still right next to the bus driver, only now she appears to have her hand in his shirt and is stroking his chest. This is about when I cleared my throat. The bus driver looks back with this sort of “oh shit” look on his face, and mumbles and apology about missing the turn and literally starts hauling ass down the back streets to get to where he was supposed to be going. Now, I am slightly worried about my own safety, because this is a bloody articulated city bus, not a damn Formula 1 car.

He somehow managed to maneuver the bus to it’s intended destination without killing anyone (namely, me.) I walk past him to the front door of the bus. He mutters something fairly incoherent and I get hit with a blast of alcohol fueled breath. The creepy woman giggles at me.

So I get out of the bus, and go to get my bike out of the rack. As I’m doing this, I happen to look up, and notice that now I can only see the bus driver, and not the creepy woman, and the bus driver has a look on his face that screams, “Yes indeed, I am currently enjoying a blow job!”

That answered one question. The creepy woman was in fact what my first impression said she was. A crack whore. I jump on my bike and ride off.

I’m getting a car.