LA City Bus

A man in his mid-thirties walks onto the bus, carrying a couple of torn shopping bags, wearing headphones, working out a rhythm in grunts and the march of his feet before he begins half-heartedly to ask the other passengers for spare change. My feet stick out a little in the aisle. He trips, slightly. We both apologize simultaneously. Every other one of five seats in the row along the back of the bus is occupied, and in the center seat sits a woman in her late thirties. Like most of the other passengers, she is doing her best to ignore the noisy newcomer, and even when she nods to confirm the availability of the seat next to her, she is looking insistently out the window. He sits. He adjusts his bags between his feet. He does all this without breaking the rhythm of his banter, which, seeming at first to address the general audience of the bus, becomes focused on winning the attention of the woman.

"Lady, I don't like pain," he starts, without eliciting as much as the raising of an eyebrow. "No pain, no rain," he continues, "but I don't like it. I go out of my way to avoid it, and no way in hell am I going to do anything to bring it on."

His voice gets caught in the filter that traps the voices of madmen and drunks, filtered and tuned out, the way one tunes out the intermittent screeching of the bus's breaks and then following, the rising note of the bus's transmission as it trundles on toward the less seemly blocks of Sunset Boulevard.

"Nope, not a fan of pain, so you can bet that I'm not gonna say anything to piss you off, when I KNOW you've got a mean right hand."

That wins it. Her head turns as if inadvertently toward him, and she looks at him directly for the first time.