I just can’t kick the habit. At the end of every day dwells
a “bus tale.” Yes, one is not all that different from another. In fact, they’re
horribly boring to me on some level yet I feel obliged to recount them on a
regular basis to whoever will listen (usually my dog or Saul – and now, you).
These experiences never provide me with revelations (except for the time I
mistook “catolica” for “Caterina” while talking to a wrinkly, old missionary
and fully realized my incapacity when it came to Spanish) nor are they
particularly memorable, but I suppose that I must find them sufficiently
amusing. Amusing enough that on my
return to blogging after a 6-month hiatus it is going to be the first of my
2009 entries…sad, isn’t it?
Let’s say it’s not really about the bus, it’s more that I
had an experience today that reminded me of a short scene in Anthony Bourdain’s
“Kitchen Confidential” where he is seated beside a woman on a plane who seems
to be oozing fat and has taken up two seats instead of one. Well, I’ve had that experience too – but on
top of the ooze factor, the woman kept on dropping her pen and requested (but
mostly required) that I pick it up for her every time. I’m not neurotic but
there’s a system…so of course I had my neck craned westward scanning the bus
for empty seats from the moment I reached out to give the driver my fare. When
I was just a few steps from my desired seat, the man walking in front of me
went ahead and took it. There were plenty of other seats but just to make a
point, I rushed up behind him as soon as he’d sat down and blurted, “Excuse
me!” Excuse me, but I want to sit right next to you since you’ve just taken my
seat. So here’s where the problem really begins.
For anyone who has visited/lived in Mexico, you will already
understand the Mexican body. Just as Chinese (like myself) tend to have small
upper bodies and are of a short stature, Dutch boast gigantic proportions and
are typically blond, Mexicans too have a shape. Here in DF, what’s becoming
more and more common is that Mexicans are becoming more and more rotund and
straying further and further from their long-and-lean Aztec ancestors. Of
course, the Aztecs weren’t their only ancestors but they were the group who primarily resided in Tenochtitlan. The general
population in the city is short and when you factor in a 3-meals-a-day diet of
Coke, corn, cheese, and meat you find that these small people tend to pack on
the pounds pretty fast and become quite bloated. However, what’s intriguing is
that Mexicans don’t get fat like their white neighbors to the north – there’s
no oozing, it’s quite a phenomenon. Instead, the skin becomes tight around the
fat, which generally tends to take up residence on the waist, arms, chin and
(incredibly enough) fingers. Never the butt and never the legs. That’s not to
say that oozing doesn’t ever
happen…sure it does, but this cute butterball effect has been more commonly
witnessed in my experience.
Seat-Stealer, I noticed, donned a lovely Hitler-esque
mustache and a denim-coloured polyester suit that creased in all the wrong
places for being a couple of sizes too small – he was definitely a butterball
shape. He had just fallen back into the comfortable dip of his bus seat and let
out an exasperated sigh when I came along with my flustered words and spiteful
intentions (I know, it was wrong but that’s how it was at the time). I watched him tug himself out of his laidback
position and move himself into the aisle (this was a privilege, trust you me.
People here don’t usually slide over to the window seat when you ask them if
you can sit next to them, nor do they stand up and move themselves into the
aisle space to allow you in. They simply swivel their knees around so that
their legs are in the aisle and prepare themselves for a different kind of
“cheek-to-cheek” action than Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald were talkin’
about…) I might also explain that these two seats, in addition to the two
across from them, were the worst
seats on the bus and they always are: they are the bus wheel seats. I had wanted
the aisle – it makes for an easier escape when it’s time to get off the bus.
You don’t have to do as long an awkward bouncy bus dance towards the back
because it’s right there, nor do you have to “rub cheeks” with anyone on your
way out of the seat. All of these factors make for both a better and happier
ride and rider in my opinion. But this time, I slid into the window seat. As I
tried to come to terms with this terrible position I’d put myself in, I felt
Seat-Stealer plop back down and I felt his knee (which were forcing themselves
into the seat in front of him considerably higher because of the wheel than
they would’ve been had we been seated anywhere else on the bus that fine
afternoon) slide towards mine. When the polyester of his suit met with the plastic
of the bus seats his knees found themselves moving away from each other – and
towards me. So now I had a knee halfway across my leg space. I could deal with
that.
But then he started getting “comfy.” It was as though he had
been holding his breath for the first 10 minutes of the ride. He had sat there,
knees splayed because they were uncontrollably moving apart like two negative
sides of a magnet, back straight, everything contained, belly only inches away
from the seat back in front of him, his chubby little arms desperately reaching
for each other across his belly, holding on in a tight grasp, then losing each
other again when he stopped concentrating on them and fell asleep…and then,
suddenly! as though his lungs had put up a protest inside of his taut collared
shirt, his quick, shallow breathing turned into one big sigh and everything
came undone…fortunately not his shirt, but his arms, barely reaching, dropped
onto his lap, his knees spread apart some more, his belly strained his shirt,
and most noticeably, this “undoing” managed to squish me into just half of a
seat.
I don’t mind a big person but I do mind when I’m robbed of my space. I passive-aggressively let out
a few annoyed sighs, squirmed around in my seat a bit, and even went to the
lengths of pretending to read my book fast so that I would have to turn its
pages frequently and my arms would have to readjust – and I would do so
obnoxiously. If only I’d chosen a different seat.
On top of my tight situation, we had scored a young,
slick-haired teenaged driver who had his “ride” nearly doing side-wheelies
every time he swerved between traffic or took corners. The roads are just not a
safe place to be in Mexico City – and I would know. I spend about 3 hours a day
either walking its streets or sweeping the pot-holed pavement in a pesero. Between
the bus drivers who treat their routes like Nascar loops, pedestrians who
insist on crossing roads everywhere BUT the street corner, and the hundreds of motorcyclists
and bikers who whiz through traffic with ease but wear their helmet on their
arm and not their head (no doubt your unscathed elbow will be very grateful when
you get hit and killed by one of those raging bus driver) you’d better have
that sixth sense for danger finely honed by the time you set foot on these streets.
On a positive note, it seems that the Chapel Bum who lives
at the Chapultepec bus station has acquired a new suit. I saw him puttering about
this morning at 6:30am in his new get-up and could only suppose that he was on
his way back to his little shrine home. There are three regular residents at
Chapultepec – the other two each occupy one beautiful stone bench near the main
entrance to the park and are harmless. I’ve seen the chubby one, Dreads, on his
feet a couple of times, usually with a torta
in hand or in mouth, and the other one just sleeps – I’ve never seen his face
as he’s usually sleeping and has his blanket pulled up over his head, but I
have noticed that he has a decent pair of shoes on his feet. Chapel Bum, though
he does occasionally venture out (such as he did this morning in his new suit),
resides in a small standup shrine at the end of the benches. How he gets in and
out I’m not sure. The slender doorway was only ever intended to provide space
enough for a person to slip in a few offerings to Maria Guadalupe, flowers,
candles, pictures, etc. so you can imagine how slim this chap is. Whatever the
case and wherever his home, I was glad to see that he’d found himself a new
suit.
