Subject: on the bus (grey poupon bus) From: "Kathleen J. Kramer" On the Bus With Kathy Jo A young woman with a navy blue Coach bag strapped across her Harve Bernard chest gets on the bus downtown. She saunters up the stairs, smiling -- until she surveys her fellow passengers. Startled, she starts groping in pockets, trying to pull off her former full-composure. The driver, in the process of pulling away from the curb, is unable to stop her from paying her fare. He loudly informs her that she was supposed to pay when she got off. *Schtupid.* Everyone jeers: never been on a bus before, eh sweetie? Even oldsters wearing coats on 90 degrees days know to pay when they get off. She places herself on the first seat and watches the driver's head, like if she stares hard enough, she'll become invisible. I feel kinda bad for her. She's mortified. Then again, it's wildly insulting to see her acting as if she's placing herself in mortal danger by being with us slobs who have no choice but to subject ourselves to each other. At least I have a window seat. I look into people's cars and imagine their lives. *Hey Mr. Volvo-With-Ski-Racks, why don't you clean the McDonald's wrappers off the floor? Too busy reading the books about being fully human that are warping on the back dash?* Hey, he's got a woman in there! A high-maintenance type with bleached teeth. She's speaking quite emphatically about something ~ so much so that veins are popping out of his temple. He grips the wheel, wrenches his neck and starts screaming because the Chevette in front of him stalled. The bus doesn't hesitate, takes it on the left and away we go! The last I see of Mr. and Mrs. Soup Du Jour is his finger barking in her face. This is better than a million Rotary luncheons. It thrills my wretched heart to see middle-class traffic with its finger up its nose, now that I know who "they" are. Even after reading Marx and Engels, I still thought the middle class was America's proletariat. Everybody works, right? Everybody hates their bosses, right? I'd hear election debates about the middle class having no tax breaks, how they were always getting screwed. Just like Carrick-ters. Then someone accused my apartment of being middle class. I thought he meant post-U.S. Steel yinzerian ~ cable spools for coffee tables, dead houseplants in the kitchen. I have a high-class home for a welfare mother and was pissed. He explained that the middle-class exists in Mt. Lebanon, not Mt. Oliver. Jesus, Mary and Joseph. All along, I'd been calling them rich. I couldn't believe the people ragging about the cost of health care were those who could actually afford it. I thought they were upset because they were going without, like the working class, not because it cut into their landscaping allowance. And yet they were the people who always made me feel like such a loser . . . We're sitting on the Tenth Street Bridge and I'm wondering what kind of car I should hate next. What luck. I see a red BMW convertible driven by a frat boy wearing Ray Bans. He's listening to rap music so loud I can feel it. And he's jamming ~ fingers clenching the steering wheel, thumbs keeping the beat. I remember seeing a _New Republic_ with a freckled boy pictured on the cover that read "The Real Face of Rap." I don't understand what these kids have in common with rappers. How can they possibly identify with the music, sing the words like they understand the nightmare inspiring them? Oh yeah, their parents make them go to college. Oh, the angst. Everyone suffers, but repercussions vary with the intensity of each experience. Breaking a finger doesn't provide insight about what it's like to lose one. There are those, after having some "character building" experience, who are able to rise above, but usually only high enough to forget what it was like to be weak, ignored, useless. They think they made good by the force of their being and feel justified in insulting those who haven't. Which reminds me of a Castle Shannon boy gone bad: Dennis Miller. I was best friends with his sister in the late '70s. They lived a block away. She dated some biker who picked me up when I was hitchhiking on 88. I was there the first night Dennis did stand-up at the Oaks Lounge, next to the Giant Eagle on Sleepy Hollow Road. Yinzer-in-denial bastard, carefully not taking himself too seriously while using a New Yorker dialect with "an edge." He jokes about the Jethroes operating heavy equipment, the simpletons who plunge to their deaths cleaning corporate windows. Stupid? You bet. Stupid enough to take the fall for the powers-that-be that we're ideologically forced to trust and revere. We don't make the laws or set the standards we're subject to, but when the world's falling apart, welfare recipients and drug addicts are blamed. I see DO SOMETHING commercials with that Melrose Place boyish-good-looks Billy bastard talking about how illiterate people are ~ as if they don't read to deliberately fuck him off. How can we blame people for being too spent to try? At the core of every loser is a broken dreamer. How can anyone claim to be educated and not understand this? I see the hollow eyes of people on the bus and wonder where they get the motivation to get out of bed ~ see the shadowed gaze panicking under the thick, curling eyelashes of young black men whose only source of self-esteem is self-destruction. Yet people wonder where the violence comes from. The answers they come up with (lack of discipline and God) are stunning examples of ego-preservation and denial. These are the same people who say I wish I was on welfare. I can never claim to understand the people around here because I can't imagine how I'd feel if I thought I'd be here forever. But nobody thinks they're going to be here long. They waste their lives believing that and never understand why they couldn't get just one break. Precious little separates us from the losers we laugh at. I guess that's why we have to hate them. That bourgeois wanna-be bastard Dennis Miller is funny, and I hate to admit that sometimes I see his point. But it's like that movie Roger and Me. Yes ~ the intent and effort were commendable. But again, it's the poor stupe waiting in front of the plasma center that we're laughing at. It's easy to snicker at defenseless folks who suffer the sins of those who can afford air-tight facades and tax shelters. Man oh man. If only bullshit was taxed . . . copyright 1994 Kathy Jo Kramer