We’ve Got Wheels--and Excuses

Best guess--and that’s the best anyone can do, is guess--says that in this county of 9.4 million people, maybe 350,000 ride the bus every day.

That leaves about 9 million who do not, and who in consequence probably don’t give much of a damn whether the bus drivers went out on strike this week or not. (They didn’t.)

Among those 9 million, some might think only how nice to have no buses shouldering along, rude and bruising as hockey goons, jamming through yellow lights, tapping the gas pedal on red, venting miasmas of AQMD high-test.

Missing buses, we’d notice. Missing riders--that would take some time. Three hundred and fifty thousand? At least that many people out of our 9 million must call in sick every day.

Only gradually would their absence begin to register. Hotel beds unmade, office wastebaskets overflowing. Clinic appointments missed, college classes half-empty. Dirty houses with no one to clean them, kids with no sitter to take the 8-to-6 or -7 or -8 o’clock shift.

*

Casting directors must be under standing orders as old as De Mille to populate movie buses with actors the same way Noah filled his ark--two of each, but now in accord with PC, not BC.

Two streetwise black guys. A couple of geezers, one with a comic head cold. A pair of gawking tourists, two strap-hanging working women in rubber-tread waitress shoes, a couple of briefcase boys and a twin set of rich women hung with shopping bags and fur coats.

To quote the disclaimer that ends each movie, “Any resemblance to actual events is purely coincidental.” To quote a friend who saw “Speed,” a movie about a boy, a girl, a bomb and a transit system, “Sandra Bullock is never on my bus.”

If she isn’t on the bus, who is?

Look for her after 4 p.m., on a broad, north-of-the-boulevard Beverly Hills street--a black or brown woman waiting at a bus stop to be collected in reverse order from the way she arrived eight or 10 hours before. Odds are she doesn’t own a car, and that sums up the rest of her station, because in L.A., you have to be pretty poor not to own some car, however unprepossessing. The frontier birthright that leaped us direct from saddle to driver’s seat dictates that only the very poor and the contented rich can bear to be driven.

I have friends who prefer the bus. It gives them time to gear up for the workday or deflate from it.

The other 9 million of us have wheels and excuses. Mine is that the lurching and swaying make me throw up. That Scott Turow could write “Presumed Innocent” commuting on the Chicago transit system struck me as more remarkable than the book.

No one ever cites the real impediment, that one immense step--not up, from curb to bus, but down, out of class. In L.A., out of all the world, to ride a bus is to lose caste. To ride a bus is to share--consecutively and concurrently, in penal language--grime and upholstery and circumstance with people who eat supper instead of dinner, who patronize laundermats.

A friend heading to work saw at a bus stop a co-worker, a kid far down the office food chain.

He beeped his horn to give the kid a lift. The kid didn’t so much as look around. His body language said it was inconceivable that someone driving a car would know somebody riding the bus.

*

In Moscow, in the Evil Empire’s latter days, we left a party so late that the subways had stopped running. Eventually, I flagged down a city bus by holding up the world’s legal tender, a pack of Marlboros.

For two packs, the driver sped us to our hotel. His only other passenger was an old woman. The apparatchik classes commandeering the first and the best was nothing new to her, for she looked unastonished at having her bus diverted, but startled when I gave her two packs, too, as much for my guilt as her inconvenience.

I remembered her when L.A.’s bus drivers did strike in 1994. For those nine days, I drove from bus stop to bus stop to offer rides.

One morning I had four passengers: a Mexican American woman working in a chiropractor’s office, a Salvadoran woman who cleaned houses, and two Chinese women.

“How much?” the Chinese women wanted to know. All week, people with cars had been collecting stranded bus riders and charging them for rides. Nothing, I said. Nada. Gratis.

In they got. Off we went.

In good Spanish, I asked where the two Latinas wanted to go. In slow English, I asked the Chinese women the same. I apologized that the only Chinese words I knew were gung hay fat choy--happy new year--and ni hao--hello.

The sound of it got the four of them to giggling. Do you speak Spanish? one of the Latinas asked a Chinese lady in careful English. In the rear-view mirror, I could see her shake her head. Poquito Eenglish, she said. Primo L.A. idiom.

We got downtown fast without all those buses in the way. As they got out of my car, the Spanish-speaking ladies said, Thank you. The Chinese ladies said, Gracias.

I said, Gung hay fat choy.

In L.A., out of all the world, to ride a bus is to lose caste.