Day for Night - Metro 5
Your ticket to another bus ride with the colorful denizens of Santa Cruz. Hop on!
This is #5 in a series of short trips on the Santa Cruz Metro bus, where our diverse residents fleetingly show their colors and later become characters in search of stories. Come along for the ride.
It’s a busy Friday on the Metro. The bus is packed with the usual suspects:
• UCSC students with wires dangling out of their heads, their expensive jeans shredded in the most unlikely places.
• a few grandmothers with their shopping carts, cell phones, water bottles.
• a guy reading an illustrated men’s magazine, holding it open and sideways to better appreciate the centerfold,
• teenage boys in the back, maxed out on testosterone, punching each other, and adding the word fuck — in all its most colorful forms, as punctuation to every loud sentence.
A very tall woman with a grey parrot on her shoulder. She repeatedly tells it “Don’t squawk.” The bird squawks.
• A couple of scruff dogs lolling in the aisles — a standard poodle desperately in need of a bath and a black lab, equally hygienically challenged. Pew!
Then, this man boards.
His handsome dark face is nearly invisible — dark beard, dark hair, dark eyes. The black cap that is jammed on his head is covered by the thick hood of his black jacket. It’s a bright 70˚F outside today, but he’s dark-wrapped, well insulated from his immediate world. Carrying a small day pack and what looks like a violin case, he comes up the steps and feeds his pass into the slot.
He slumps down on the first free seat without raising his head. When he does look up, he jumps as if on the receiving end of a jolt of electricity. The woman seated next to him, is apparently the cause of this ignition. He stares at her, and can’t seem to translate what he’s seeing.
The woman seems to refract sunlight like a clear crystal prism. Her long white hair is fine as spiders’ silk, and nearly transparent. Her eyelashes and eyebrows are white, the ribbon she’s tied in her hair is the same lavender as her eyes. Her skin is so pale and delicate he can see the blue veins beneath it. If he has ever read Tolkien, he will recognize her as one of the elves of Lothlórien. He totally forgets his manners and continues to stare at her.
She’s looking at her phone, holding it up about two inches from her face. She looks at the screen a little obliquely, her vision obviously affected by her albinism. When she finally looks up, he is there, looking startled. She smiles at him and says, “Hi”. He manages a wobbly, “How’s it going?”
Though these two are of the same species, they could not be more unlike — he is the starless night to her sun-washed day, the dual embodiment of Yin and Yang riding into town together on route 3B. I can’t imagine what they’d have to say to one another, they seem to be of such different worlds, but I am wrong. He regains his power of speech, and overcomes his shyness. They begin to chat softly, heads together. Twenty minutes later, as we approach the downtown station, I notice they are both giggling about something.
We all exit at the Metro Center, sandal-feet shuffling, dogs whining, carts rolling. the sludge-metal noise of the Melvins banging out of a pair of head phones. I watch the two of them walk away together down River Street and into the rest of their lives.
* The photo of the man and woman are from Unsplash.com. I don’t photograph people on the bus.
* If you liked meeting a few of the riders today, you will like these too:
Mayhem on Six Wheels - Metro 1
Characters in Search of a Story -Metro 2
Summer Solstice Party Bus - Metro 4
Use a Radio, Go to Jail - Metro 6
Your powers of observation are superb, Sharron. I’d read a book of these!
Love this series you write Sharron. People. Who are they, where are they going, what's their story? Endless fuel for writing. Thanks for sharing. - Jim