Bookcovers From The Bus

My car petrifying in Canada, I have taken to the bus.

"Two kinds of people ride the bus," said my friend, "Crazies and tree-huggers." I like to think I fall into the latter category. Ummm...yeah. Can I create a third category? artists-turned-desperados who fell prey to a crazy system?

Anyway, I only met 2 "crazies" on my RT to Wenatchee and back. On the way there, I met a woman who sat across from me and told me she was certifiably crazy. She had been diagnosed. It was just me and her on that bus at first and I wondered where it was taking me.

A few more people got on. Across from me sat a man who appeared to be homeless, with all his clothing in a clear comforter package bag with a zipper. Behind me were two guys. One of them piped up, "Hey! Hi! Are you going to Wenatchee?" I said yes. Then he said, "Are you going to the treatment center too?" huh? "I don't THINK so," I said, "WHAT treatment center?" I was quite alert at that point, but the guy who seemed homeless next to me burst into laughter. He turned around and yelled, "You fool! That's not a pick-up line man... Are you going to the treatment center too???" he kept laughing and then added, "Save the personal baggage for a little later down the road!"

I started talking to the "homeless guy". I asked where he was going and what he was doing. He was on his way to man a fire station on a mountain with some other guy, and worked as a firefighter. In an hour, I heard about how he'd done a tracheotomy, delivered 5 babies, and jumped out of planes into the back end of the fire. He said all those shelter tents that firefighters carry for cover, are "I.D. bags". Useless for protection. He said the first baby he delivered came out looking at him like he was an alien and then looked at the mother and then back at him and then at the mother and then back at him (the mother was white, and he was black). He told me I would like sky-diving and then told me to go to Langley, Canada for hang-gliding.

I fell asleep, and then, I missed my stop. Not being a bus-taker, usually, I had thought it was a direct-flight (direct-drive?) ticket. So I was suddenly in Seattle instead of Wenatchee, with a huge layover until I could take the next connection to Wenatchee. So I went to the library and posted on my blog and read magazines on glass art, feminism, torture (Mother Jones), NYT Book Review, the NYT magazine article about "Dr. Phil With Guns", and some other stuff. I meandered back to the bus, where the nicest baggage guy handed me my things. He saw me starting to put money into a machine for a locker and insisted he save me the money and keep them in safety in another baggage area. Leen. His name was Leen.

On the transfer from Seattle to Wenatchee, I met a man who was fighting a legal battle to get witness protection. He gave me the name and phone number of his attorney. He helped police and FBI with a sting for a murder-for-hire deal and saved 5 lives, but one state promised witness protection and the other one didn't and when it was over, he got nothing. He had to hire a lawyer to help him disappear. Of course I'm never giving his name, occupation, or where he went or was going after the bus came to a stop.

The next day I was going home and missed my connection by 5 minutes. Hitched a ride to a gas station, hoping I'd find truckers going to Seattle where I could catch the rest of the bus. Standing around, with the convenience store people understanding my situation, I told them I'd work for free while I was there. They refused to let me clean, so I offered to front the shelves for them. Then a grocery distributor overheard and said I could help her. She handed me the exacto knife and I started opening boxes and stacking snacks onto the stand. It was a little humiliating in a way, as people from Wenatchee were coming in and giving me looks and I recognized some, and they would smirk and leave. But I plugged away, and after no one had come in all that time, after I started helping the store out, this guy came in and asked the cashier the best way to get to Seattle and she yelled at me, "He's going to Seattle!" They were all excited for me and my good luck. One of the few times of "instant karma".

He was interesting. Educated, I could tell, after he said about 5 sentences. I asked--was right. He had a degree in Economics and another in Transpersonal Psychology. I wanted to know what Transpersonal Psychology was and he told me about it. He also told me how he knew Rajneeshi personally and was part of the group. The same Rajneeshi from Oregon that bought their own town until some people started embezzling and the U.S. deported Rajneeshi for immigration reasons. Really interesting guy, anyway. I was dropped off at the bus terminal and was approached later that evening by a guy who looked like a former gangster.

He was tall, with a snowcap on and then a baseball hat over it, tipped to the side, and baggy pants. He asked me where I was going. His tone was sort of "Joey-from-friends"...i.e., "how YOU doin'?" Where YOU goin'? So I was open to chatting, and it was no big deal and he's talking about how he is going to technical school to be a flagger and then I see this rolled up magazine in his hand. I saw a flash of the letters: New Yo... and said, "Is that the New Yorker?!" He sort of glanced at it like no big deal and said, "Oh. yeah." I said, "You read the New Yorker?" and he said he had a subscription. He said he wasn't in politics but kept up on them and current events. His grammar wasn't the very best, so I questioned whether it was really his subscription, and, he didn't look like the type to pick up the New Yorker, but he wasn't using it to swat flies either.

We talked about hippie culture. He let me keep the magazine, it was the Feb. 21, 2008 issue, with the woman walking her leopard on the cover. Inside, he had flagged down a corner from an article about the CIA: "The Spymaster". He had flagged down the corner of page 49, which has a photo of McConnell, director of National Intelligence, standing at Bolling Air Force Base, a good half-way into the article.

"I wouldn't have thought you read the New Yorker." He asked why not. I said he didn't look like someone who would read the New Yorker. He asked me what I looked like then, and what impression I had. I said, "I don't know...(stumbling)...Uh, sort of former gang member, who either isn't doing any drugs now but getting ahead, but used to deal or something, or someone who does a little dealing on the side." He said no, he'd never dealt drugs. We agreed one cannot judge a book by its cover.

I told him I'd seen a bunch of marijuana, and that there were all kinds of varieties and I never knew this before. He started talking about how some people even use flavors and I started laughing because some people I met used blueberry flavoring, he asked me about the variety I saw. It was Christmas something or other, and had lots of crystals on it. "What color were the crystals?" he asked. "White and clear" I said, and he nodded after I answered, and he explained how it was processed and how it got that way. Despite his grammar and slang, he explained the process with the accuracy and fluidity of a chemist, pouring one liquid from a vial into another and swirling it around in the glass, lifting it up to to the light to peer through the transparent new color.

"I realized I was looking through a different lens than before," I had said, hours before, to the man with the degree in Transpersonal Psychology. "How do you know that?" he asked, "Where did you hear that phrase?" "What phrase?" I said, "The different lens phrase", he said. "I don't know," I said, "Maybe in an English class in college?" But I had first noticed the concept, playing out in my life, after I had taken a nanny job on the East Coast at age 18 and then come back with a different view of things, and recognition that I had been affected and changed in my surroundings.

There was another man I noticed, who was taking the elevator in the Everett bus terminal, when I was speaking with the guy carrying the New Yorker. I don't know who he was but he was staring at me, watching me talk to the other guy, with a delighted smile on his face, and was smiling until the elevator doors closed, like he knew me. Did he know me? Probably not. But I've found a lot more people know about me or recognize me than is reciprocal.

We don't get to know about anyone by making guesses. I am always surprised at how different people are, than they appear to be, once we get to talking. Sometimes people simply "are what they are" and what you see is what you get. Then, sometimes we think we know someone so well, and yet we don't know them at all. Some covers are thicker than others, for better and for worse.

Hardbacks vs paperbacks. Each has its pros and cons.