Riding the back of the No. 1 bus, Hollywood style
Life was weird in Hollywood, and a trip on a RTD bus was no exception.
Los Angeles Herald, 1980
By Bill Steigerwald
Trying to read a newspaper on a bus bouncing and swaying its way down Hollywood Boulevard to downtown Los Angeles is tough enough. But in the back of a No. 1 bus — on the route they used to call No. 91—it’s impossible.
I was doing my best to ignore the unpolished boot that kept brushing against my thigh — it was in my lap more than my paper was.
Already I had stopped looking up every time the guy said “Yep,” which was about every 60 seconds.
And I no longer noticed his Kool cigarette smoke that wafted over me occasionally, or worried about what he could do with the bottle of Seven-Up that he fiddled with inches from my white, middle-class ear.
I was as lost in a Wall Street Journal guest editorial by Leopold Tyrmand as any RTD voyager can hope to be, when a guy in jogging sweats and Korean running shoes abandoned his absolute back-of-the-bus seat and slid in next to me.
"Ever been in Soledad, man?” he asked.
“No,” I said, abandoning a paragraph touching on the different ways American liberals and conservatives define the idea of the social contract.
"Well, you look like a teacher I had up there once," he said in a friendly, ex-convict kind of way, shifting his toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other.
The Soledad alumnus, a bus-buddy of the guy with the Seven-Up bottle, hopped back to his original seat just as a black man in his mid-50s wobbled past the two women standing in the middle of the aisle.
He sat down in one of the several seats the women preferred to leave empty.
To anyone who'd lock eyes with him, he'd ask, “What's happening, brother?" as though he really wanted to know.
He asked a Latino kid about six times before the kid said, "No comprende.”
“No comprende, no comprende,” the 11:15 a.m. drunk repeated as the kid jumped forward to a freshly vacated seat. His question, "Are you from Tijuana, brother?" remained unanswered.
No passenger responded to "Wanna flip for a quarter?" either, but a few lurches of the bus later, the drunk and the guy with his foot on my editorial page were playing a friendly game of mass-transit craps on the floor.
The Soledad grad moved forward so he could kibbitz better. Quarters came and went about as quickly as the mutual jivin' and teasin', the sharing of smokes and the good-natured laughs.
Although it was as un-threatening as a bridge party, the fun and games became unbearable for a natty black man in a tweed sports coat and tie who had seemed intent only on staring into the copy of "The Brethren: Inside the Supreme Court" that he cradled in his hands like a missal.
Yet he, too, scooted up-aisle at his first chance, dropping his yellow plastic shopping bag in his haste.
Other mass-transiteers broadened the demographics a bit.
A woman in her 30s, with a dazed, almost retarded stare, silly looking clothes and short, straight hair parked her rumpled self in the farthest corner of the rear-most seat.
A Hollywood bag lady in training, perhaps? She chirped indignantly at one point — “He touched me!" — but later didn't seem to mind when the guy with the cool hat and nonstop toothy grin sitting beside her snaked his arm around her shoulder and caressed her cheek with his knuckles.
Many of the regular riders of the No. 1 must have missed the bus, however.
No transvestites or off-duty prostitutes, scary crazy people, shell-game operators or sordid Hollywood citizens were aboard.
We bounced and swayed our way downtown and soon the crap game ended. As I left with my mostly unread paper tucked under my arm, the ex-con lit up a crooked but ample joint.
I had nothing to fear from the gang in the back of the No. 1 bus. No one did, really.
But the gray-haired ladies standing in the aisle weren't so sure.
Understandably, they continued to ignore the empty seats in the rear, as your mother or my aunt might -- as most anyone not accustomed to Hollywood's indigenous wildlife would.
I walked the last few blocks to work at the L.A. Times and I thought about the old No. 1 and wondered how closely it represented the RTD's larger world of mass-transit busing.
I also thought about the politicians and transportation experts who subsidize public bus fares, create disincentives for automobile commuters and exhort the masses to ride buses in the name of what they've decided is the common good.
I wondered if the RTD’s transportation specialists ever hear stories like this.
Or if their wives or daughters or mothers regularly use public transit. Or if they, just for laughs, ever ride their own buses.
Note: Though I was a part-time copy editor at the LA Times when I wrote this free-lance opinion piece, the Times would not run it. It was deemed ‘racist’ by the editors in charge. I snail-mailed it to the smaller, feistier and braver Los Angeles Examiner and they put it on their editorial page the day after they got it — with an illustration.
Buses are sort of forever the same.