A Small Book About Buses and Trains

Here's a funny thing—illustrating something or other about form shaping content, I suppose. Leafing through one of the little notebooks that I always carry to snatch down the odd image or snippet of someone else's conversation, I realized that, owing only to the circumstances of their composition, about every third entry pertained somehow to being in transit.

Here, then, is some of what I know about the buses and trains (and sometimes planes) of Chicago, collected without intention over about six years.

1. An Epigraph for Life

"I got 90 pockets. Watch me. I'm gonna be like an octopus. Taking inventory of this shit. I lost my ticket. I'm gonna find it. I got my phone—at least I got my phone! I got change. I'm gonna get paid." —a passenger on the Red Line of 2012 or so

2. A Metaphor of How to Catch Success

Stand up close to the track, then scuttle sideways till you reach a door.

3. An express train gusts past the windows, a gray-scale blur like the newspaper-page montages used in certain corny movies to indicate the passing of time.

4. In the emergency-exit row of a plane, I am informed of my duties in a manner novel to me:

"And you do understand that in the event of an emergency, no one will come to assist you?"

I nod, braced and a little thrilled at my boldness in this existential moment.

5. Westbound Pink Line, evening, 2009 or so:

"The cake lady's sister just died, so she can't do our order."

6. The large, elderly person across the aisle is emitting at intervals a ghoulish sound which rationally I know to be a painful cough, but which trails every time into a demon chuckle, channeled through him from somewhere in the bowels of the earth.

7. Amtrak

Beside me sits an enormous frat-boy type, backward Cubs cap and all, who, upon splaying himself in his seat and part of mine, begins immediately eating from an enormous bag of Combos—nacho flavor, I think, from the scent. Now he proceeds to twist open and spray onto the floor a bottle of Sierra Mist. Now he is listening to something awful on an ancient off-brand Discman.

He has just placed his backpack on my foot.

He gives a flatulent cough. He is drumming on the table between gulps of pop.

Some respite: he rises. He has to stoop as he moves down the aisle, and as he lumbers away from view I think that it must be difficult, to be a person of such phenomenal natural vigor and always be made to check oneself in this way. He ought to have sailed the bounding main and slept on deck, in boundless salt air and the boundless camaraderie of his peers; but he has landed on a little train in this small century, beside me.

8. "The earth is not your home," beams the missionary woman on the bus. It is a sunny day, though. "Okay," I say, and allow her to place a thin white tract in my hand.

9. Fallacies, Part 1

I sometimes catch myself reasoning as if time worked the same as distance: if buses arrive every half hour, then I am never more than 15 minutes away from catching a bus.

10. Rain pours down the back of the train car ahead in tiger stripes. Across the aisle a woman of 50 or 60 reties her green leopard-print scarf around her head. She carries a green camouflage bag, the creature and its environment at once.

11. Between stops, the rain has become snow.

12. Fallacies, Part 2

The Red Line and the Brown Line stop beside each other and exchange a roughly equal number of passengers. A logic moves through me that says: why shouldn't everybody then just stay where they are?

13. An old couple on a loud train cannot hear what each is saying to the other, but, across from them, I can. Should I offer to translate?

14. A funny thing is happening on my way into the subway. An old man lifts his leg up onto the handrail, stretching like a ballet dancer.

15. Eternal Beauties

The flash of satin gold on the subway tunnel's wall before the train's one eye comes peeking through.

16. On a Good Night

A bus comes slowly into focus, distinguishable from other vehicles by the soft brow of light above the two wide eyes. It arrives, tilts a friendly shoulder in my direction, and I board. I take a seat behind a woman with long, still-damp black hair, which gives off a boozy scent of styling product.

17. At 10 o'clock at night, a man carrying a large ironing board with a polka-dotted cover boards the southbound Red Line.

18. An Ideal State

I stand to one side of a pillar and realize after a couple of close encounters that people approaching from the other direction must not be able to see me until the last moment. A little girl, pulled along by the hand of her father, passes and finds herself staring openly into my face as she goes by, as though I were an appealing billboard appearing through the window of her train.

19. She takes out a lighter from her coat pocket and flicks it briefly, as though checking for the time written in flame. Then she gets off the bus.

20. Good Education

On the Sedgwick platform of the Brown Line, a mother to her young child, in a tone of gentle conversation and instruction:

"And here comes the train, right on time. Now ain't that a blessing?"

21. A child to her father:

"I got a brother named Justin Bieber. My friend's got a brother named... Paris. Paris... Chicago. Paris Chicago.

"What store is that? What store is that? Can we go there in the morning—after we go to sleep?"

Public Noises

Above all other train lines, the Green Line to Pulaski is in my experience the most filled with the doomed and the desperate. Every time I ride it is packed shoulder to shoulder with varying states of crisis.

Being poor, or irreparably damaged, or both, is always very urgent business, much of which must be conducted in public. The air inside the cars is loud and heavy with cell phone conversations, often not quite one-sided, since many of these talkers have the volume set so high that one can understand at least the interlocutor's mood: frequently just as repetitive and raging, but sometimes reticent, sometimes putting forth the calm, impermeable realities at hand with initial patience which drains away slowly or quickly.

Sometimes you think a new angry conversation has been dialed up from behind or beside you, only to realize that the person sighing violently and saying “God damn” or muttering “enough, already” is just responding to another's rudeness. You are on the same side of the battle but resent the complainer's choice of weapon, resent the added noise.

On two trips today alone – from downtown to Oak Park for a job interview (I'm getting those now, in quantity) and back – I have been confronted in this way with amputated toes, broken teeth, disputes over the custody of dogs and children and, at greatest length, a middle-aged  and violently ugly man sitting across from me methodically dialing every number he seemed to know and barking into it, “TELL THAT BITCH SHE BETTER PICK UP HER DAMN PHONE.” He rarely offered any elaboration, except at one point when he instructed someone to go to the woman's house and regain possession of his shit.

(A week or two ago on the Harlem bus I sat near a man conducting a much more civil-sounding conversation, which did not begin to filter into my awareness until it became apparent that he was trying to talk a girl into appearing in some form of pornography: “No, no, I mean, unless you were planning to maybe run for office some day, or really break into mainstream movies, there's no way it's gonna matter. We had one girl, she's in law school now.” It seemed unlikely that the girl realized that he was laying out his business plan from the bench of a public bus in the suburbs.)

Even less malevolent conversations can be poisonous, if there are enough of them. You may change trains or disembark and then see sickness everywhere -- passing judgment on all the faces whose features disorientation seems to have permanently displaced by a few crucial millimeters -- and feel as though you are the last civilized being in the city or the universe. 

Then you may remember, for instance, the time coming home so late at night, the last traces of a little too much alcohol helping to weigh down your eyelids, when you found yourself utterly unable to determine how to reach the other, necessary side of the train platform. You wandered up and down the empty Thompson Center escalators in a fuzzy panic, descended to street level, looked around, and still were baffled; you ended up taking a longer route home. It may have been months later when you finally returned to the station and realized that you need have only looked up: a perfectly normal footbridge arches over the tracks.

It is not so hard to imagine this kind of confusion becoming permanent. One thing you hear in this bleak chatter is the kind of schedule it is often necessary to keep when you are poor. You may need to travel two hours each way to reach the single, minimum-wage, full-time job you could find a few months after your unemployment ran out. You may need to awake each day at 4 AM. This may cause you to fall asleep on your way home and miss your stop by miles, costing you more time. If you are ill, or have difficulty moving, travel will be that much more tortuously slow.

If you are a woman, you probably will add all this to the time and effort of transporting your children; when you are not with them, you probably will be on your cell phone with the unreliable web of other persons and institutions that share in their care.

Anyone has had to catch a 6 AM flight without having slept beforehand, or a panic attack in a public place, or a particularly enveloping head cold, one of these thorough burglars of lucidity. There is no reason why such a state could not keep perpetuating itself, especially under conditions of enforced exhaustion. In the wrong circumstances life could certainly become an unending bad dream, in which you are constantly exposed in public, made to conform to standards and fulfill responsibilities that are unfamiliar or had been totally forgotten. This could be a reality from which you would not be able to see out, though everyone could watch you writhe and call out in the throes of your dreaming, everyone could glare your way and say: “Enough, already.”

When I transfer to the Brown Line all is quieter. Here too an older black man with a cane is declaiming the history of his medical problems, near-death experiences, and subsequent recovery through Christ, but he has found a flesh-and-blood listener, a younger white man. The listener is polite and responsive. He is trying to do it right, to engage honestly although he would not have chosen this conversation. He is, I'm almost certain, a young liberal with the luxury of enough space and clarity in his life to accommodate problems that are not his own and conversations that are not acts of dire self-preservation. I recognize him, though I would not do quite so well, I think. Us types. What're we gonna do with ourselves and the world. I suspect we take it on as a kind of social service, to sit and listen, a service which is not entirely unrecompensed; we may feel a shameful impulse to tell our friends about it later, inviting them to marvel at our goodheartedness. But the kindness is at least partly genuine, the sense of duty somewhat realer.

The storyteller leaves the train. I've changed seats and without turning I can't see the listener, who remains. But he does not sigh in relief or exchange a knowing chuckle with anyone else who has been listening less gracefully, as I've seen others do, as I might do myself if I were the type to voluntarily make any public gesture. That's good, I think, observing the space around him. That's a start.