Night Bus Grandpa - 02/12/07

Last night, Lyndsay and I were heading home from a nice Thai meal in SoHo by getting on the number 3 Night Bus off Haymarket. No seats below--and I can count on one hand the number of times I sit on the lower deck on a double decker bus--so we head up.

We sit toward the back of the bus; me being a bit oblivious as I often am to insulate myself from the sound and the fury, it only comes to my attention a few minutes later that there is a teeming mass of prepubescent gangsta hormones seething with pseudo-street rage at the back of the bus. There are about 10 boys and girls listening to and singing along with music they're blasting from the tinny speakers of their mobile phones.

This is nominally interesting because--although the R & B and hip hop to which they were singing was as robotically uninteresting as most mass produced musical bog water is these days--listening to them interact with it was fun.

But then one of the little guys lights up. On the top deck of a bus where smoking probably hasn't been allowed since the early 90s, this kid who is at least five years away from even thinking about shaving is sitting there at the head of his group of friends, in the midst of a bunch of silently frustrated bus goers (from their mid-twenties to their sixties) puffing away--or at least pretending to puff because I don't think he has any idea how to inhale.

The kids are yelling at each other, the girls are trying marginally to ask the one guy not to smoke, but mostly it is just a nascent testosterone fest by a bunch of punks who think that manhood is something they learn from music videos.

I take it for a while. But I'm tired, work was frustrating, and I don't want to breathe smoke all the way back home. Other people are getting visibly upset.

I turn and stare down Smokey the Bandit. He looks at me with eyes that are a bit disturbing--glazed over with stupidity and hatred and dulled by the cough medicine he has undoubtedly nicked from a pharmacy to get where he wants to be that night. He looks at me, scowls and then asks me what the fuck my problem is.

I point to the no smoking sign and say, "See that lovely sign up there. In case you can't read it, it says 'No Smoking'." He looks at my dully but trying to be angry. His friend, younger, perhaps 13, tells me to "Suck his dick." Had I had my wits about me, I would merely ask, "Son, have you even gone through puberty?" But of course my wits aren't anywhere to be seen. I am sitting on a bus, seething with rage because here is a group of punks who've found that pushing the boundaries of social acceptability is just so much fun and I am stuck with them. I am raging at the fact that I find myself obeying social dictates (You know? Like ones that say "Don't beat other people's poorly raised children in public. Hope that when they get home their parents will do it for them.") whilst they sit there hopping across invisible social lines waiting for someone to tell them to stop.

(We should pause to note that Lyndsay, sensibly, tries to put a calming hand on my forearm, because she's seen first-hand what happens when people speak up to roving bands of British shits, no matter how old. A good friend of hers, who is black, watched a man get beaten severely in full view of the rest of the passengers on a bus because he was the one person to stand up to a group of kids who had been racially harassing Lyndsay's friend. With no fear of 2nd Amendment nutters armed and with a permit to conceal, and the British penchant for tight-lipped silence in the face of social outrage, there just doesn't seem to be a great fear of consequences.)

But let's not focus on my stupidity and anger at kids doing what kids do, albeit more loudly, angrily, and maliciously than I've seen in a while. What really gets me going, is the couple behind me; an aussie couple in their early 30s. At one point, the woman is clearly upset and turns around to see what's going on, only to find Smokey sitting directly behind her. She must have knocked his knee with her elbow or something because he fixes her with a glare of pure, dumb hate. Her boyfriend's response? To sit quietly looking forward, saying nothing. Her response? To apologize effusively saying, "I'm so sorry, I did not mean to offend."

What the f@%k?! (warning: rant coming on...) She doesn't have to say anything. She can just turn around. But that apology only feeds his stupid, feral rage; vindicates him in his quest for power beyond his 14 year old lot. That is appeasement of the kind that still makes old men fume at the thought of Vichy France, that makes the Dutch still quietly hate themselves for acquiescing in the face of Nazi might.

Now the comparison is absurd, and my rage is no better than his. But if he and his companions are the ones going to be taking over in a few years, then I guess I'll just have to kick back, pop open a few colds ones and watch the apocalypse.

Then again, maybe I've just become an obnoxious old man who needs his Maylox because dinner didn't go down well...

(Random picture from Sketch Book--completely unrelated)

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