Hell on Four Wheels
Riding a bus on a college campus is a tricky task.
While this may not seem to be true (you’d think that a public transit vehicle that was stuffed full of the best and brightest of today’s youth would operate efficiently), there are enough potential pratfalls and hidden rules that taking public transportation while in college is a lot like having sex for the first time: a razor-thin balance between necessity and awkward embarrassment.
Let me paint you a picture: You are taking Hispanic Literature on the north side of campus at 10:20 a.m. through 11:10 a.m. on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. At 11:30 a.m., you must be on the south side of campus in time to attend your Accounting class.
At a smaller college, where the only student recreation center is a broken Joust arcade game that nobody has bothered to remove from the administration building since the 1980s, walking across campus in twenty minutes may not seem like such a big deal. In fact, it could be seen as a chance to stretch your legs and get some fresh air between classes.
As a fat kid at a large university, though, walking across campus was an hour-long Bataan Death March that left me soaked in sweat and in need of a shower.
The solution: take the bus.
When riding the bus between classes, every second counts. There is no time to waste chatting with friends after class. Time spent dillydallying equals time spent awkwardly explaining to your professor why you chose to be late for their class. If your friends try to distract you, ignore them. There are always new friends to be made; there is only one bus.
Sometimes you’ll get lucky and the bus will be pulling up as you reach the bus stop. This prize is a double-edged sword though. While you are fortunate enough not to have to wait for the bus to arrive at the stop, you may feel obligated to let the people who were waiting before you get on the bus first.
This often means loosing any chance to ride the bus. Due to your petty indulgence in kindness, you will be left standing on the sidewalk while the bus is crowded like a can of sardines with no way for you to wedge yourself in the crevice between the girl talking on her cell phone and the frat boy checking out the girl talking on her cell phone.
But even if you manage to squeeze your way onto the bus, you will then be faced with yet more challenges.
I was taught at an early age that part of courtesy involves giving up your seat to any present ladies who might be standing. At Texas A&M, where the majority of the male population could be construed as “Good Ol’ Boys of the Highest Degree,” courtesy is not a choice, it’s the prime directive.
The first thing most guys seem to do when getting on a bus is to stand in the aisles — no matter how many free seats may be available. The fact that a dozen or so dudes are crowding the aisles in an attempt to show you that they have more chivalry in their right nard then you have in your entire body makes it near impossible for any female to squeeze herself through the mob of standing gentlemen and find the available seats us guys are fighting so hard to offer up in chivalry.
This leads to the bus leaving behind half a dozen females who were unable to find a spot on the bus even though an equal number of seats remained unoccupied, crowded out of sight by the mess of males standing in the aisle, posturing to each other like cholos before a fight.
Being the foolish progressive thinker I am, I believed that by sitting down in the first available seat I was making it possible for more girls to ride the bus then I would have by hoping the seats would magically fill up with girls able to use ninja-like skills to maneuver between the aisle dwellers blocking their path.
This, unfortunately, often led to me being crowded into my seat, surrounded by other guys who decided to stand up. Unable to join them in the aisle even if I wanted to, I found myself being forced to sit down and watch as girls walked onto the bus and remained standing.
While I truly believe women are just as capable to stand up as men are, all attempts to rationalize my sitting with feminism went out the window when I glanced at Jed the Friendly Neighborhood Corps Cadet glaring at me. His gaze, a powerful tractor beam of hatred, made me want to jump out the window of the moving bus or spontaneously combust — anything that would enable a young lady to have my seat.
As the years went on and I grew more and more comfortable riding the bus, I developed several steps that would prevent such uncomfortable situations from happening.
Method # 1
The first method is the easiest: Sit down and pretend to fall asleep. If I close my eyes, the hateful stares Daddy’s Princess and her protective legion of country boys are shooting me don’t exist. If I can’t see Jed mouth the word “I’m going to eat your testicles for breakfast with my biscuits and mustard,” then he didn’t really do it. The only problem this method leads to is the increased chance of actually falling asleep and missing your exit.
Method # 2
Sit in the seats where nobody in their right mind wants to sit anyway. Any seat next to the extremely ugly is more often then not going to remain empty. I might as well sit there. Likewise, if I sit in the far rear of the bus where the side rows meet the back rows, the seats situated in a tight corner that I can barely squeeze my legs into, I don’t dwell so much on the fact that girls are standing while I sit. This is mostly due to the fact that I’m in so much pain from the angle my knees are in, I can barely remember what girls are.
Method # 3
The last, most prized method, involved me riding in the area between the row of seats and the door of the bus. This section, a claustrophobic nook was often cut off from the rest of the bus, unable to be sat in by the majority of passengers. But if I was lucky and found an opportunity to sit in this seat, I could relax in my little slice of isolated heaven, unable to feel the rank breath of a student who partook in a noon beer running down my neck or have my crotch ground against somebody’s backpack. I would be out of sight and out of mind for any girls that wanted to fight over the plethora of seats my more chivalrous of brothers had saved for them. I was totally out of the way, biding my time until my stop. And then, one day a blind man got on my bus.
I heard the tapping of his cane before I saw the man. As he slowly walked onto the bus, I found myself staring at his eyes, the creamy color of milk. I soon found that I would have plenty of time to stare at his eyes because Matt Murdock decided that he was going to stand right in front of me.
At first, I didn’t give it any thought because my stop was still quite a ways off. As I sat back in my seat and continued to stare unabashedly at his eyes, I noticed that he was wearing headphones.
That had to have been a contender for the stupidest thing I had ever seen up until that point. Why would a handicapped man want to impair another one of his remaining senses? Did the guy want to get hit by a pickup truck?
As I considered what he might be listening to that was so important that he would put his life in danger, I enjoyed my ride, snuggled away in my stowaway spot. Eventually, though, it came time to exit the bus.
The man, still standing in front of me, was blocking my way. I started to wave at him, in order to get his attention, before I caught myself. Instead, I tried calling out, hoping he would hear me over his headphones. No luck. There was no getting this man’s attention save pushing and/or shoving him. But you don’t push a blind man, do you?
I did.
I pushed the blind man out of the way and hurried off the bus.
I rationalized my misbehavior by telling myself that it wasn’t like he was going to hold a grudge against me. He didn’t even see me. For all he knew, he was jostled by Caper the Impatient Ghost.
As I left the bus and ran towards my class, already quite a few minutes late, I dodged the eye bullets that were hurtled my way by witnesses to my misdeed.
I couldn’t help but feel a wave of resentment rise up in me. They didn’t know what I had to deal with. They weren’t in my situation. On the bus, one has to put aside their morality and conscience. On the bus, we are stripped of all that makes us civilized humans. We become savages, only concerned with our own petty desires. It was like Lord of the Flies and I wasn’t about to end up a Piggy proxy.
The Bus is hell, man. The Bus is hell
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