The #22 Bus

Last night, SB Thursday and I went to Carol's again, but I didn't leave at 9, like I promised. We left around 11, when the crowd got ugly. Almost all at once, some tragically upwardly mobile kids came in, causing the Korean vet with the potbelly and the unnaturally black haired woman with ill-fitting dentures to leave. I was sad about this because I had been having an almost interesting conversation with the black haired woman, despite being distracted by the fact that her dentures seemed to move in her mouth independently of the motion of her jaw. I began that conversation to avoid having to talk to a man in a fedora who was talking about how the Jews were ruining the world. I tuned him out sometime around when he said that the vast stores of "Jew diamonds" that were in the World Trade Center when it collapsed were never recovered. Somehow, this led him to the Irish Mafia, Vietnam and Pvt. Lynndie English pointing at an Iraqi man's genetalia. Poor SB Thursday had to listen, though as Fedora Nazi kept pointing directly at him. Eventually, after hugging the Korean vet and crying a little onto his sleeve, even Fedora Nazi slipped off his barstool and into the night. The kids displaced all of the interesting people simply due to the fact that they were so brand new to adulthood. They looked a little bit like bread dough rising in their suits and Banana Republic career separates. They're not bad people, but really, they're barely people yet.

All of us at the bar - me, SB Thursday, the anti-Semites, the career kids, the gypsies, tramps and thieves - had an undeniable air of expectancy. What are we all waiting for? The kids looked as if they were waiting for the time that they could finally say they had "made it." I know the look. I was married to the look for four years. The denture lady was maybe waiting for someone to need her. Someone to grab her hand and say "I've missed you." The Fedora Nazi was waiting for someone to agree with him, to talk him out of his despair and say "I know exactly what you mean." SB Thursday was waiting for me to make up my mind about him, but he didn't know I already had. I was waiting for what I always wait for...my heart to be smashed to bits by a love too big for it to hold. And SB Thursday doesn't inspire that kind of feeling in me. He is a good, kind man, but he is not MY good, kind man. So, we all get to keep waiting.

I thought about all of this as I waited for the bus this morning. Typically, the #22 will either come at a very inappropriate time or not come at all. This morning it was more along the lines of not at all. I waited, I read my book and tried to be calm, but I found myself walking out into the road and staring with shielded eyes up Clark St. After fifteen or so minutes, more people joined me and we became impatient en masse. I was about to give up and catch a cab when I saw the sun glinting off the top of the bus, some three blocks away. It always comes when you give up and curse it. It's always there when you've ceased believing in its existence at all. It comes and, when the door opens with its pneumatic "shush" sound, you feel a little foolish for doubting. It would be facile and slightly disgusting of me to say that life and love are like the #22 bus, but the greater truth is that statement would be a complete lie. What I've learned at the beginning of my tenure as a full-on adult is that sometimes the metaphorical bus just never comes. Nobody ever tells you that. Sometimes we die alone, sometimes we never find someone who shares our thoughts, sometimes we are not needed by anyone and sometimes, no matter how hard we work, we do not make it. The trick is how we get along when the bus doesn't come.