Recollections of a Bus Stop by Brett Gallaway

     It was a bright day, cool but bright. The shade under the canopy roof of the bus station on 79th and Madison was a perfect refuge from the overcrowded intersection. The mid-afternoon subway rush was just letting out and I could hear the trail ends of congenial sentences and cell phone conversations as they floated by the open slits of the paneled glass divider. These were the voices on which I had normally found my attention fixated while waiting for the M-31 to take me home. I was subjected to this mundane routine daily. The incessant wait for the 31 was never a surprise. Sixty-seven bus lines in this city, and I got stuck riding the slowest one. I always found myself waiting alone at the stop, and by alone I mean with none of my classmates. They all normally changed buses three stops north on Park or Fifth. I couldn’t help but blame my parents; they could have sprung for the Park Ave. townhouse twenty years ago. Instead they took the safe bet, a coop on York. Cheap bastards, could have made six million on the house by now. Yep, my wait was definitely their fault.

     There was always a scattered assortment of seniors waiting at the stop, to weak in their old age to make the walk to the upper-echelon retirement home just five blocks uptown. These were the wrinkled faces I was accustomed to, my four o’clock welcoming party. We all visually knew each other; we had to. I had seen them five days a week for the last four years, but no one ever spoke. Especially not to me, the pretentious sixteen year old donning his emblem blazer and creased polo club chinos. I was a perfect poster child for these geezers’ innermost fear, the stereotype of spoiled and pompous youth soon to inherit the nation. My education had been top notch, schooled under the careful eye of Ivy League alumnae since long division. I truly was a product of my environment. Privilege is born into privilege and so the sequence continues. I would never have the opportunity to achieve success through Benjamin Franklin’s method of hard work and diligent service. Rather, after law school I would slide into an executive job at my father’s firm, twenty-five years old with less than a year of on-site experience. I’m sure my devout forty year old Franklinean associates will be quite fond of me. After that, who knows? Life is a cycle. Maybe I’ll end up back here at the bus stop with my fellow ex-jetsetters, waiting for a metro chariot to drive my aging body those tiresome five blocks.

     As the sun continued to beat down upon me, it redirected my thoughts from the future back into the present. I wiped the few beads of sweat off my forehead with the sleeve of my mandarin Cavali shirt. It was too expensive for a child of my age. The stiff disco length collar must have looked awkward folded over the slacken knot of my pizza stained orange and blue school tie. My attention continued to wander as I began slipping in and out of my current reality. I was the only-child of a wealthy Italian real estate developer, who, through the lack of siblings, had developed a dangerously colorful imagination.

     Never fearful of my cognitive ability, I made up stories for my elderly counterparts to suppress my perpetual bus station boredom. Lifestyles I could envision them having 50, 60, 70 years ago. Each liver spot and elongated ear-hair told a tale. Immigrants coming off the boat in lower Chelsea, raised in ethnic slums, marrying wealthy and leaving their starving families to survive in Brooklyn. Southern farm boys sent off to the war, lucky enough to meet a friend in the airborne that gave them a profitable tip on the stock market for when they returned. Teachers, mechanics, actors, their lives changed in my mind everyday. My illusions and interpretations of their past changed with the weather. In truth, most of them were probably old money. Their sons had sent them away once they had taken control of the company, no longer having the patience to entertain their quibbles and outdated suggestions. A distinct class of Wall Street Oedipals had emerged over the past fifteen years, taking over their fathers' trading brokerages while the old men lay helpless and senile. My bus stop had become the purgatory for these displaced fathers, waiting for their ride to a ‘better place,’ a seven story brownstone with sterile nurses and bi-daily medicine calls.

     I wanted to approach her. The 5’4 vixen cascaded lightly against the sunlit Plexiglas of the bus station backdrop. She was a new face, easily noticeable among the collage of wrinkles and green teeth. The girl was too beautiful for her current company. The collection of faces looked awkward, a battlefield of ashes around a single blossoming rose. I had never seen her at my station. The unknown intrigued me. Had she been too engrossed in her gossip with friends that she had passed her stop? Maybe she was a new student, parents recently relocated from their banking jobs in the South of France. My mind began to wander and draw conclusions as it always did. I couldn’t refrain from staring at her, dribbling my eyes from her mid-sized Prada backpack down her cashmere cable-knit sweater, to her revealing patch-worked Dolce mini-skirt. Her designer taste payed compliment to her tanned skin and unscarred legs. I could tell right away she took meticulous care while shaving them, not one apparent knick or scratch, a flaw that had become a personal turn-off. Toned calf muscles, most probably the result of her cross country team. It wasn’t that she was jock, but rather she needed athletic participation to make her look well rounded for college. Her smile was perfect, thin lips that jealously guarded a perfectly pearled set of incisors and bicuspids alike. I noticed the ravishing smirk when our eyes had awkwardly met as she stepped off the lowering hydraulic stairs of the M-79.

     I wanted to strike down the army of pastel windbreakers that enveloped her. Shun propriety and lift the stranger into my arms with a kiss. I longed to spill out the slideshow of images that had passed through my head over the previous three minutes. The life I had created for her was colorful, vibrant, and exciting. She had come from good breeding and a stable household. Her father was named Chaz, after his uncle Charles who had started a successful business in Europe and had brought the company overseas to New York at the turn of the century. Her mother was a bit of a trophy wife, but not in the twenty-three year old floozy ostentatious way. She was in her early forties with only one minor plastic surgery operation to date. The girl had an older brother, very over-protective. He had once jumped one of her ex-boyfriends when he came out of school on an early Wednesday afternoon. It turned out he had cheated on her a multitude of times. Everyone knew about it in her class but her and when he broke the news she was mortified. Her brother would have none of it. He couldn’t protect her anymore, though, living out west at Stanford, finishing his undergraduate degree in socio-economics. But that whole incident was four years ago; she has since shed her braces and pig-tails, developing quite nicely into an attractive young woman. She didn’t do drugs, but she had smoked pot twice. The increase in appetite she felt as a consequence was bad for her figure. She was a social drinker and was never carded at the trendy downtown bars she went to every Saturday night. The costly Gucci blouse and Marc Jacobs hand embroidered purse served as identification enough. Her friends had been the same group of four faces since elementary school hopscotch. Each of them were equally beautiful but with different features that made the choice of which one to court quite hard for the nervous boys eye-fucking them from every corner of the club. She had become quite a tease in these situations, knowing exactly what hip-contortions and eye-flutters would buy her the next Cosmopolitan. There had never been a serious boyfriend in her life. No sixteen year old could financially quench the appetite for luxury she had acquired, and no successful twenty-five year old oogler would be acceptable to present as a boyfriend to her conservative right-wing parents. She instead had intemperate flings with older jetsetters and feral trust fund babies, occasionally bringing home the lucky well groomed acne-free teen to be her façade in this uneasy relationship game she played.

     My concentration was broken by the hot blast of air against my cheek from the exhaust of the M-31 coming to a stop at the corner. The doors of the bus opened with a hissing screech that was quickly drowned out by the rush hour traffic of cars and vans slowly inching along the far side of the vehicle. The same hydraulic stairs that had brought her effervescent life to my attention now lowered to take her away. It took a while for her to board the bus, for she had etiquette enough to let the silver haired skeletons enter first. As the sea of saggy chin’s filtered out, I could see her full pose, every curve accentuated by the bright sun reflecting off the triple pained glass. As she scaled the rubberized non-slip stairs of the bus, I hesitated. Frozen, I didn’t move, I didn’t want to move. Her life was my fantasy; she lived in the numinous utopia of my imagination, not a side street off York Avenue. If I were to see where she got off the bus, it would bring a tinge of reality, decaying the fitting life I had envisioned for her. Once again, I stood on the outside looking in. Looking into the window of the bus as she walked towards the rear; looking into the window of her life as she stood unaware of my prying intuition. The doors closed and she was gone.

     The hot blast re-introduced itself to me once again as the bus slowly rolled away from the curb and into the fire-lane flow of traffic. The next bus wouldn’t come for 30 minutes. I pondered how many faces and stories would pass me in that time, how many new lives I could envision. But who has half an hour to waste in fantasy? Fuck it. I’ll walk.