Yesterday afternoon I took a bus downtown to meet my friend Bravadita at Pioneer Square. It was perfect weather, warm and clear, a good day to meander to the Library and down to the river. Of course, we didn't realize there were amusement park rides and mariachi bands taking up all the normally peaceful space along the waterfront. Drat. Cinco de Mayo! But that is another story.
Bravadita was an adjunct at the career college where I worked up until last Thursday. After she was cold-shouldered out of the rotation, she was unemployed for a long time. She cobbled together a couple part-time gigs teaching kids to read, but she's currently looking for other work—preferably something where she can use her writing talent and not be continually infected by the latest plague. We have a lot in common: desperation and hope. We talked shop over coffee, which left me hyper-amped with excitement and caffeine when it was time to get on a bus to go back to the Love Shack.
I was buzzing along, enjoying the bus ride in an aisle seat, when the woman sitting next to me stiffened and pointed downward. I followed her finger and saw rivulets of liquid streaming across the black rubber floor. Uh-oh, I thought... is it blood? Is it urine? It was spreading rapidly in little streams in all directions.
At first I couldn't believe my eyes. It looked like the source of the liquid was the leg of the man sitting across the aisle from me. He was a young guy wearing jeans, a button down shirt, and earphones, and he was holding a laptop bag on his lap. A little spray of liquid was coming out a grommeted hole near the bottom of in his laptop bag. Mesmerized, I reached out and touched the source of the leak and then looked at my fingers. Brown.
“You're leaking,” I said to the man, touching his bag gently.
“What?” He took off his headphones.
“You've sprung a leak.” I pointed.
He opened his bag and dug around. He lifted out a stainless steel coffee mug, now almost empty, and held it up, looking chagrined. The girl in the seat in front of me held up her superior stainless steel coffee mug. “You should get one like this,” she said.
“Clearly!” he replied. “My mail is completely soaked.”
I made sympathetic sounds and thought the incident was over, but he seemed compelled to continue speaking, no doubt to assuage his social embarrassment. As the bus rumbled over the Morrison Bridge, he kept talking to me. No one else seemed to be interested in participating. Curious about him, I replied with inanities, thinking sooner or later he would finally be quiet and I would regret the silence. I rarely ride the bus, but in my experience, people usually don't talk to strangers. Maybe it was a measure of how deeply mortified he felt, because he kept on talking. And I kept on replying.
“It was yesterday's coffee,” he informed me.
“Ah, the best kind,” I said.
“You'd think I would have noticed the coffee spilling on my leg.” He pointed to the coffee stain on his thigh.
“Tepid, was it?” I asked.
“No, it was about the temperature of my office.”
“Oh, about 70°?”
“More like 67,” he replied seriously. I thought, is this really happening?
“But why didn't I notice it?” he asked in a slightly anguished tone.
“Perhaps you were having an out of body experience,” I suggested, motioning at his headphones, which were wrapped around his neck. You can tell a lot about a person as soon as you make a comment about having an out-of-body experience. That's why I mention it frequently. I always smirk a little when I say it, though, so they don't think I really believe in that stuff.
“No, that can't be it,” he mused with a frown. “Although I've often thought it would be better not to be in my body on the bus, with all the people...”
“I've often felt that way myself,” I said soothingly, thinking of how many times I've wished to be a discorporate intellect, floating through the universe free from the burden of this sagging, wrinkling, aching body. I'm not sure that is what he was thinking. He was younger than me, in pretty good shape from what I could see, although he probably has a desk job. He looked a little nerdy, like a 30-ish computer geek, a little soft around the edges, but hip enough to wear trendy jeans.
“Then I could escape all the crazy people on the bus, like the ones who spill coffee.”
I couldn't help laughing. “I rather like the bus,” I said, because at that moment I was enjoying it very much.
We were at about 20th when he got up suddenly and moved toward the front of the bus. He came back with a handful of paper towels and started mopping the now-drying coffee trails.
When he resumed his seat, I said, “All these people will get off and no one will know it was your coffee that spilled.”
“You're right. I could blame it on them,” he said. Then he looked sideways at me. “I could blame it on you!”
“That you could,” I laughed. “Feel free.”
He was quiet for a time. Then he said something else about how embarrassed he was over spilling his coffee.
“Don't worry about it,” I said. “It will give me something to blog about tonight.”
He got off somewhere before Cesar Chavez Boulevard. He said goodbye to me, waved at the bus driver, and as the bus pulled away I saw his face for the last time, intently gazing into the distance. He did not look into the bus, just a nondescript guy who lives in the trendy part of Southeast Portland. I doubt I would recognize him again, unless he was carrying the same laptop bag and wearing earphones. And spilling coffee.
I didn't blog about it last night because I wanted to capture the essence of the last surreal day at the career college before it faded from my mind. I imagined that guy going home and searching the blogscape for a blog about a nerdy klutz who spilled coffee on the bus and had a conversation about it with a middle-aged woman. What keywords would he use, I wonder? Idiot on Belmont bus spills coffee. I hope he was able to laugh about it with his significant other when he got home. It sure made my day.
