I ride the bus to work

It doesn't matter when I get to work as long as I get there by 9. Most people in the department don't even bother to make it in by then.


I ride the bus in the mornings.

Just like in the day, on the school bus.

Like I'm on my way to school.

I'm still tired no matter what. I daze off and my eyes are blurry.

I put my feet up on the heat duct that runs under the seats. I pretend to be reading my Henry Miller but really I am looking at the other school girls.

The black girls are crazy. They're  wild things with big earrings and fake braids in every multi-colored rope-like texture. Rope spaghetti snakes and Play dough coils.

One black lady had her hair done like a poodle with a pink bow in it. I told Lindsay it was like her parent's Shiatsu. The girl sitting in front of us heard me. She smiled.


The Mexicans are silent. Their men and women are always traveling separate and sit there stoic-like. I suspect that they have the hardest workday ahead. Onward they go, the brave invisibles, former medicine men of the desserts, stepping forward to clean everyone else's shit.


The bus is named the G2. I think of it as the Ghetto2Georgetown. There are three different times that I may catch this one depending on how late I stayed up the night before.  One arrives at 7:40, the other at 8:08, and the last one that could get me to work on time arrives at 8:17.

Each of these has a corresponding hot white girl that also rides at that time. On the earliest is the most beautiful.

She's the tall one and thinnest. Elegant! She wears designer gear, wide brimmed hats, and long gloves to hold the IPod. Her leather bag has steel rings on it that match the stud in her nose. I can smell her all the way from the front. The smell mingles in a strange way with the rest of this working crowd and jerrycurl juicers. But she never looks around. None of the hot ones do. And this one I only get to see if I get up early enough, which is almost never.

On the 8:40 bus is an Asian girl who wears brown leather boots, a style that must have been inspired by the Lord of the Rings movies. She's an elf. She's got some cute short cut that has sort of curly sideburns that curl along her cheek. She gets on with an much more normal white girl. Sometimes they sit together, sometimes they don't I don't know why this is. Are they roommates? Neighbors? Are they arguing when they don't sit together?
But the Asian girl doesn't read. She just looks ahead, straight on. And when she gets off, she doesn't look back.

The third girl on the late bus ( I see her the most ), she's great like the first girl. Maybe they're the same girl. She's amazing though, so slim and smooth. She sits on the bench that runs along the side of the bus up front. She crosses her legs and takes out a magazine and starts reading it. She never once, ever, looks around. She never nods off, nothing. She just reads on the bench with perfect posture. I can watch her as long as I want, and she will never even twitch her nose. And everyday, when I get off at DuPont, shes still reading her magazine. I can watch her through the windows as the bus goes down the road.

How can a magazine be so interesting? To never look around, not once?  Don't you have all day to read reports and fill out spreadsheets? To have no interest whatsoever in the world around you, that is amazing.

Is it because it's the ghetto bus? Bad to make eye contact with the working class. Maybe her nerves are screaming with stimuli, but she's trained herself to never look up. Maybe she's got a man at her house. Maybe he knocks her boots all night so shes filled with him and only has room for Cosmo, or whatever it is.

Maybe she's satisfied.

I don't know how it's done, this absolute disinterest in the planet. Maybe I've got it all wrong. But I don't know what the purpose is. Of never looking up. Maybe I just don't understand women on the bus.