It had been a very long day. At the end of a thirteen-hour film shoot in Park Slope, I was forced to walk three long uphill blocks to get the B68. I don’t like taking the bus, and this is generally the only bus I take. When it arrives, the driver says, “Get on the one behind me”.
When that one arrives, the other driver says, “I’m done”
“The other driver said to get on your bus,” I explain, with a couple of tired passengers behind me to back me up.
“I’m done” He’s stone cold, with his gloved hands up at a full stop.
We head down to the F train, which isn’t so bad if it weren’t for the fifteen-minute walk from the stop to my house. Fortunately there’s a bus that can cut that down to a five minute walk if I’m willing to wait. I arrive at the bus stop to find four people already waiting. Their names are Kate, Kat, Val and Chris; they are my age, and the first thing I hear from them, with all the aching walking and waiting, makes it all worthwhile.
“We been waiting for this bus so long, we coulda watched a whole other episode of Golden Girls, lemme just point that out” says Kate. This iconoclastic moment all but drops the exhaustion from the day behind me. My heart lifts and I slump down to jot it out.
“Y’know someone learned English from watching Golden Girls” Kat says.
“Yao Ming” Kate and Liv say simultaneously.
The bus comes and the girls say goodbye to Chris, boards the bus with me. He tells me he’s engaged to Liv and shows me the tattoo on the inside of his lip, which spells out her name in black ink. “I got so blottoed before I got it done, but the moment the needle touched my lip” He jolts upright and his eye shoot open, “Stone sober”.
We talk about the originally kung-fu stars of Hong Kong Cinema and he tells me about the price of beer in Berlin “Twelve cents after the bottle deposit”. My stop comes in a few moments and I bounce all the way home.
