Until THE WEEKLY STANDARD offered me a parking space and I began driving to work, I was a lifelong consumer of public transportation. Trains, in particular, are a favorite of mine, including subway trains and underground shuttles. I am less enthusiastic about buses. This may be because of the ponderous nature of bus travel–subject to traffic and frequent, prolonged stops–but I suspect there’s a psychological element as well.
I began commuting from suburban Maryland into Washington for school and piano lessons at age seven, and used to think that I spent three-quarters of my time standing at cold, windswept, desolate bus stops waiting for buses that seemed never to arrive in timely fashion. Especially in the city, I was also subject to the attentions of men we would now call homeless, who took advantage of my status as a sitting duck to plead for money or, in certain cases, demand it in the cause of social justice. On the raccoon theory of supply and demand–feed them once and you’ll never be rid of them–I would decline.
To be sure, a panhandler in ragged clothes asking for a quarter is something even a young boy in the Eisenhower years could comprehend. Not so the other gentlemen–somewhat better dressed, considerably more voluble, outright friendly–I would encounter on my very long, very tedious, homeward journey.
In the morning my bus was packed with middle-aged, newspaper-reading commuters, male and female; as the evening shadows lengthened, however, my return trips were taken on near-empty buses. Following my lifelong tendency to sit in the back of any room I enter, I would climb on board, find a seat somewhere near the rear of the bus, pull out a book (Death Comes for the Archbishop, The Boys’ Life Treasury, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, 1066 and All That), and read contentedly.
Once every few weeks, however, I would find my reverie interrupted by odd, slightly furtive, unwelcome men–considerably older than me, sometimes gray-haired–who, surveying the vast landscape of an empty D.C. Transit bus, would sit beside me and, after an awkward moment, strike up a conversation.
Needless to say, my parents were not the sort of people who, having committed their seven-year-old to solo travel on a city bus system, would have warned him about things that were, in the late 1950s/early 1960s, essentially unmentionable. And it took a while for me to unravel the mystery of why these vaguely disconcerting fellows should have settled next to me when there were so many empty seats at their disposal.
But I held my own. A combination of innate shyness and not-so-well-repressed fury combined to keep my responses monosyllabic. I had no desire to make a new friend out of some random busrider three or four times my age who wore multiple rings, smelled of cologne, and had ruined my comfortable seating arrangement.
Moreover, my alluring wife assures me that my facial expression in repose looks (in her memorable words) as if I “want to punch someone out.” So I tended to speak as little as possible, glare sideways, and pretend not to hear the gentle inquiries about where I went to school, what I was reading, where I lived, what my name was, and how often I took the L-4 bus. In due course they would obligingly shut up, and sometimes even stand up and change seats.
At the time, I was puzzled by the attention. I was not then, and have never been, a pretty thing and, like any seasoned bus rider, usually regarded my fellow passengers with a baleful eye. But I suppose the sight of a lone 13-year-old in a tweed jacket and tie, reading a book (The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud, This Side of Paradise, Lord Jim, Harpo Speaks) might have suggested a certain vulnerability, or sensitivity of temperament, or hunger for love, or whatever. How mistaken they were.
As the years went by a certain innate cruelty of spirit took hold, and I would fix such intruders with a bemused expression, or offer nonsense answers, or tell them that I had “gonorrhea–or diarrhea, I’m not sure which.” I have always remembered one slightly pudgy, pasty, slightly balding specimen wearing a brown leather jacket, who spoke in a thick Southern accent. Taking note of the volume in my hands, and seeing that I was an embryonic literary type, he blurted out, “Have you ever read City of Night by John Rechy?”
So taken aback was I by this reference to the 1963 bestseller which, in the words of its dust jacket, documents “the garish neon-lit world of hustlers, drag queens, and men on the make who inhabited the homosexual underground of the early sixties,” I could only laugh in response.
Somewhat nervously.
PHILIP TERZIAN
