I took the Metro to Work

I took the metro to work for the first time because I missed the late bus.

It was funny alright. I was walking to the bus stop as fast as I could without running. I thought I could hear the thing coming but was hoping it was my imagination, until I saw it roll by the intersection up ahead. That's when I ran. I thought I could catch it if it got stuck at the next light. It didn't. And when I came around the corner, I saw its bulky rear-end bouncing across the next street and rolling up Florida Avenue.

I took the schedule out of my bag.

People think it's funny that I carry a bus schedule with me. It's like a ritual. I'm invoking the gods of the Metrobus. Its superstition really, like reading tea leaves. All it tells you is when a bus won't be at a certain place. As if, the bus definitely won't be there wherever and whenever the schedule says.

It said the next bus didn't come for half an hour. That time slot wasn't circled on the paper, meaning it wasn't getting me to work on time. By this information I decided to walk it to the metro, about six blocks away.

To get there I cut through the historic Shaw Neighborhood. It reminded me of the nice part of Hyde Park in Kansas City. But it was on another scale. The houses are all row-style, three-story mini-mansions painted in all sorts of bright colors. It was cold in the shadow of row houses so I crossed the street to the sunny side. It was pretty nice in the sun. It was quite and there was no one around at all. I got the sense that I was walking in a sleepy eighteenth-century English village, but then I hit the traffic of Florida Avenue.

Florida runs through this old old part of town that is now, and has been, really rundown. It's a wild corner because it's close to Howard University and the Metro station. There's lots of commerce but its all crazy stuff. Like really small CD shops that have blaring speakers on the sidewalk. I think a Pawn shop, definitely liquor stores, some takeout Chinese places, barbershops, Ethiopian restaurants, and a bunch of shops that I can't tell what they do. But all of these places have cages and barbed wire over the windows, caged doors that are swung open in the morning, and inside, wherever they have booze or cash registers, the clerk is behind some scratched up bullet-proof glass.

At night, when I'm walking around here, I feel like it's a little sketchy. But on this morning I got to see it in the light and even the boarded-up old cinema with it's barbed wire fence, didn't look so symbolically menacing, it just looked sort of sad. One of the Ethiopian restaurants already had something cooking up, and it smelled pretty good. The people looked more normal too, just like people on their way to work always look. The homeless guys hadn't gotten up yet, I passed one sleeping in newspapers and plastic sheeting with his stuff in bags and garbage sacks on the sidewalk next to him. And there was the trio of three, old black men already hanging out in front of the barber shop. I would see them there at night too, when I was coming home.

I came to the station entrance. I passed a guy handing out free papers and stepped onto the escalator.

I was in good time when I made it to the platform and the light-up sign said the next train was due in four more minutes. I took out my Henry Miller and waited with the other few people around. Even in the morning Shaw/Howard wasn't a busy station.

When the train came though, it was packed, so I had to squeeze my way in. I still had Henry Miller out but I didn't look at it for the most part because there were so many people to look at instead. I'll say that I like to look at the beautiful white girls and Asians, and Arabs, but the black people are usually the most interesting, all of the black people, not just the girls. This is why I usually have a hard time reading for long periods on the metro. But it was really too busy this morning to get in a good read,

At the transfer point to the Red Line I shuffled out with the rest of the humanity and everyone seemed to be going up the escalator with me. Then around the bend to the other track where I found the platform thronging with faces all looking the way of the tunnel where the train would come from. Across the canyon of tracks you could see the same scene, kind of hazy, all the people doing the same thing on the other side.

I moved down the gallery of faces until I found a clear spot to stand in. It was crowded. All of benches and the leaning positions on the wall were taken. It seemed that a train hadn't come for a while. I could sense the eagerness of the crowd, all waiting in anticipation, all with somewhere to be in a short amount of time. I stood there with them, having somewhere to be myself, and took snippets out of the open Henry Miller while checking out the passersby.

When the train finally came, the conductor was already pleading with the waiting mob, "...please let them out of the door before entering. Stand back from the doors and let the passengers exit." It was something like this, and, "there is another train directly behind this one, please don't crowd."

Everyone crowded for a spot anyway, and I again found myself shuffling into the train and then being forced down the isle, away from the doors by the inflow of commuters.

After a couple of tries they got the doors shut and the train was off again. There wasn't really room to get the book up in front of my face so I just stood there leaning a little from side to side and back and forth with the crowd. On the wall next to me was a sign saying, "What's your alternate route home? Be prepared for emergencies." I thought to myself, "What's my way out of this whole damn city?" There's no way out. If something goes down, no one is getting away to anywhere. The sign should say, "Dirty bomb! You dead!"

Looking towards the front of the train, I noticed one of the girls I had seen from behind on the platform was Kathy, one of Lindsay's new roommates. She saw me too and when some people got off we worked our way over to each other.

"Hiiyaa Bob," she said smiling and rolling her eyes. She showed me her teeth; I watched them as she talked. She always talked like this, with her teeth and her eyes. She was one of the chill girls I had met so far in D.C. She was from the South somewhere and was a soccer-girl. She was also another of the young-professional class in D.C. Someone that wasn't going to live here long and the whole time they would be here, they would have some clerical or administration job in the government or at some foundation or society, or group or union. This is what the whole town was doing. And all of the job titles were very long and probably had some acronyms in them. I myself said that all of the job titles in D.C. translate to one thing; filling out spreadsheets.

I had a brief talk with Kathy. We talked about her roommates. They were all like frat boys, but were more of these young-professionals, still, with lots of broken glass and spilt beer. The rude housemate, Clements, didn't want her to live on his floor. He wanted to make a girls floor. She didn't understand what his problem was. I told her he was afraid she would catch him jerking off.

With that we came to her station. She left with most of the crowd going to Metro Center. She waved and flashed those teeth and rolled her eyes again and the door closed. I didn't sit down. I was the next stop at DuPont.

As the train left the conductor started his spiel about how this was the Red Line train to Shady Grove and the next stop was DuPont Circle and so forth. When he finished with the part about, "...And thank you for riding Metro Rail, have a nice day," a man standing down the isle behind me started mimicking speaker. "And ya'll have a nice day," he said, "Have yo'selves a very happy happy... LOVELY day!"

He repeated himself louder, "Have yo'selves a happy good lovely day… everybody!" He raised his hands up and teetered with the sway of the train.

He continued on like this with no one paying him any attention. Then when he was done wishing everyone a nice day he announced that it was his birthday. "Yes indeed," he called out, "today I am fivety-three."

"Five-tee-three, that's me."

I turned my head a bit and gave him a long sideways look and saw that he looked jovial alright; he may have even been fifty-three.

As the train was approaching my station he started to sing, "Happy birthday to me! Happy birthday to me, Today I'm fivety-three." He was going through the entire Birthday song. And as I was leaving the train I looked around at the people's reactions. There was this white woman that looked a little angry, she was gripping the hand hold on the seat in front of her and staring straight ahead. She was frowning. Most of the people were looking at the floor or the wall and trying to act like nothing out of the ordinary was going on. There were a couple of half smiles, but they were still looking at the floor and not trying to make eye contact. The black people onboard didn't even seem to notice the singing bum.

I headed out via the escalators that climb the height of a building out of the cavernous Metro station. I checked my watch and saw that I was in good time. I thought it was a good one alright, that after all of that walk and the transfer, the Metro was still faster than the bus. I just stood to the right side of the stair and let the stair climbers pass. I had time to get in some more people watching as they watched the sky come closer as we ascended to the light and to our many "important" destinations.