The Bus from Brownsville
Sunday, March 16, 2008
The youngest one stood for some time, eying me cautiously, though concertedly, from beneath the furry hood of his jacket. He slumped his shoulder and knee into the nook formed by two sides of a sagging gate and a rusty chain. Bits of water and debris filtered down from the elevated train platform above our heads and sunlight diffracted its way through rubbage caught in barbed wire and illuminated the fence. When the b47 bus did finally come he called anxiously to an older girl who had been having one of those phone calls that older girls have on their cell phone while waiting for the bus. She wanted her audience to believe she was handling important business, the type a young woman of seventeen or twenty might handle, though she had not the business or the years to conduct such a call in earnest.
When the bus finally did round the corner I stamped out a 1/2 smoked cigarette, not thinking much of it. This aroused further suspicion from the boy who was already wondering why the white person in a bright orange coat was waiting for a bus in a neighborhood best known for being featured in shows like Law and Order SVU and COPS.
This is Brownsville, where the only white people are school teachers from neighborhoods with names like Park Slope and Carroll Gardens. The police, the firemen, the lawyers, the business owners, and yes, the criminals and the families are all people of color.
The bus, as usual at 4 pm, was packed to the breaking point. Old women balanced grocery bags on their wrists while clinging with both hands to poles for support. Small children sat on thier parents laps. School kids clung to their back packs. And people entered and exited like molasses, changing shape and clinging to surfaces while they slowly oozed to and from the doorways.
I happened to chance a seat in the very back, where the men and boys with spray paint or drinks in brown paper bags usually rule, but today it was me and the kids from the bus stop and a budding new adolescent friend.
The girl ended her phone conversation.
Girl: Damn, this niggah be trippin. I ain't movin down South. I hate it down South.
Younger Boy: Down south is bad.
Adolecent Boy: (With a fay lisp) Why issthat?
Girl: There aint shit do do. It boring. I like the city, the North, the action.
Younger Boy: They hit you with a bat down South.
Adolecent Boy: Na, I thought that was just in them older times, like before rights.
Girl: Nope, I am talking about North Carolina, they hit you in the school if you get in trouble.
Adolecent Boy: Really?
Girl: Yeah, one time I told this bitch (teacher) to mind her own business cause she tried to touch me and they wanted to hit me, they took me in this room, but they had to check the permission forms first, and they hadn't got permission to hit me, so I was ha, don't touch me, bitch.
Younger Boy: Uh, uh, they aint nobody touching me, and no bat, thats why I hate the South.
Girl: Oh look, look. This is where my grandma's house is at, like two blocks this way, then three that way, she has a nice house, tight furniture, a tv. We got like 3 computers at my house. One in the bedroom, one in the living room and one in the other bedroom. We have mad computers. We have so many computers.
[ Out the window is row upon row of rundown brownstones flanked by soaring tenement buildings. The bus stops, the younger boy gets off. ]
Adolescent Boy: (Completely infatuated in the 'gay boy has a crush on the butch girl' way) Over that way . . . Do you know this girl, I think her name is like Shemica.
Girl: Shenika?
Boy: No Shemica, they call her like Meeca, she live that way (points).
Girl: They call her Meeca? She a big girl, likes to jump people?
Boy: Yeah, she my cousin, she funny.
Girl: Yeah, Meeca, right? She tried to fight me. She thought I was sleeping with her girlfriend.
Boy: Really.
Girl: I was like, I ain't sleeping with your girlfriend, and I aint gonna fight you, she crazy, she cut people. This other time I got jumped by some bitch who was all like you sleeping with my boyfriend. I was like I aint fighting no one over no niggah. She was a scary bitch. Then find out she 5 months pregnant. I was like, bitch I coulda killed your baby. Why you fighting me.
Boy: This one time when I got jumped, somebody had a razor blade in they teeth. (Lisping away) They teeth, isn that crazy?
Girl: That is some Upstate shit. When I was upstate niggahs and bitches be crazy, they got them razor blades in they teeth. Shit. Upstate. That shit is crazy . . . Oh, this my stop.
Boy: (Lying) Me too.
It was my stop, too. They got off in front of me and I watched them saunter off into the hussle and bussle of Broadway and Myrtle Avenues. I couldn't help but see myself in them. I remember telling outrageous stories in high school, especially to my nice and easily excited gay male friends. They weren't untrue, exactly, but they were more entertaining in the retelling than the living. And the boy, who to the rest of the world may have looked smitten, seemed to me to have found someone, perhaps for the first time, that let him speak, by which I mean say words out loud, even though he had nothing in particular to say. It is hard to be heard when you are that fay. Sometimes, it takes a really insecure, by which I mean, trying to be wise before her time, dyke to bring out your voice.
Every now and then, while she was talking, she caught me peering up at her from my magazine. Her story would suddenly get more ostentatious, or violent. Perhaps, it was for her benefit as an out of place queer and budding story teller as much as for mine, another out of place queer and budding story teller.
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Posted by betwixt (anonymous) on March 17, 2008 at 2:22 p.m. (Suggest removal)
That ride is out of control. Take up space, take up space!
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