The Navy Way

It was bad enough seeing them “smooch” – right in front of him – the “old biddies.” It was bad enough the late bus Dave was on wasn’t going to make the downtown connection he wanted. It was bad enough it was almost eleven at night and his John’s Landing apartment was way back the opposite direction and he was feeling the start of a bout of “the squirts” wrenching his guts. But when those “old broads” got on each other’s nerves and started griping, Dave had a hard time with his mouth.

Dave. Capital Hill Dave. His apartment was in the converted old B.P. John furniture factory he’d worked at for twenty-eight years. Started there “right after the war”. In Paris, Dave never got Edith Piaf’s songs, tried to but never fell in love, never did dad. But Dave knew Portland. He knew every bus route by heart. He knew every street by heart, on every bus line, in the exact order the line crossed each street. He litanyed street names at captive bus riders all the time – rapping the street names out with his right hand in a kind of beat. Tonight, like Dave’d done for dozens of green Bus Operators before, he’d promised a fresh-out-of-training “girl” Bus Operator he’d show up and “chaperone” and guide her on her midnight trip down into the isolated, truckyard shadows and drydocks of Swan Island.

But seventeen minutes yet from downtown, the two old women sitting right at the front door started to gripe. They griped so bitterly, Dave wished they’d make up and “lock lips” again. They told the Operator he was braking too hard and “went over that speed bump too fast”. They told the Operator he didn’t make a complete stop at First and Harrison. They were toxic to Dave’s diarrhetic insides. They had to have it explained why the “driver” wore sun glasses at night and why didn’t he turn the heat on? The Operator didn’t say one word to them, but they said he was “impudent” and demanded to know his name. Silently, he showed them his official name badge. When they read it said “Mad Max,” they flew off both their handles and advised him that downtown, they were going to report him to a Supervisor. Further, when they exultantly warned they had Mad Max’s bus number now and his route number besides, plus “the exact time” and they “know people at City Hall,” Dave stood up eager for a fight. He took two towering steps toward them. Smiling ominously down at them, he boomed,

“You two old bags musta been in the Navy!”

Startled, the short one sitting nearest the front steps wanted to know, “What ever do you mean, sir?”

“Yeah,” Dave grimaced, “The Navy teaches ya ta bitch about things.”

It was a good thing that pair didn’t say another word all the rest of the way downtown, because Dave was at the end of his colon. Like usual, he was wearing a diaper, but he hated the thought of stinking while he guided a “young lady” Operator down onto Swan Island.

Uber-interested in seeing Dave get off his bus, Mad Max took an off-route short cut and made Dave’s downtown connection anyhow.

*              *               *

 Winter drug out. Dave couldn’t get people to listen to what he knew about the city.  In a paperback called Dress for Success, Dave read where you get more respect in a blue raincoat instead of a brown or tan. Dave kept checking the thrift stores all over the city until he found his dark blue raincoat. Just five bucks. Winter dried into Summer. Dave’s dark blue raincoat started working right away. Now, not many people got up and moved to somewhere else in the bus. His dark blue proved he was public safety on-track. Summer heated up, but Dave stuck to his same respect-commanding blue, all-weather uniform.

Stagnant-hot, full-moon Friday night: because he was on speaking terms with the Operator, Dave grabbed Mad Max’s empty Harold bus out-bound.

Stopping short, down in the front stepwell, Dave stood smiling up at Max.

“To right twenty-sixth, to left Gladstone,” smiling Dave chanted to the beat of his right hand, “To Foster and fifty-second, thence right fifty-second to left Harold, to…”

Moving to interrupt Dave’s crazy behavior, Max asked, “How’re you tonight, Dave?”

“Mean. Just mean,” Dave grinned. “What’s Felony Flats givin’ ya tonight, Max?”

“Back there past the back door. Drunk, I think, but quiet.”

Dave glanced back in the empty bus, then did a double-take. The griping old-lady shipmates again.

“Oh, I can handle those two dames,” Dave smiled. “Just leave ‘em to me.”

“If you wouldn’t mind too awfully, Dave, can I get first dibs?”

“Professional courtesy?”

“My preference.”

Max figured he could manage Dave. Dave was grizzly old. Problem was, though, Max was experienced, but only on the West Side. Max only worked at night, too, so he never talked to the Operators that worked inner-city Portland. Max knew Dave as Dave – not Capital Hill Dave.

Out-bound, crossing 82nd Avenue, Max picked-up two clear-eyed, long-hair young men. They both had pre-paid Passes; they were re-assuring.

 Until, they walked all the way back and oddly, in Max’s empty bus, sat down directly across from the two women.

Until, Dave saw the “gals” kiss.

Until, at the end of the line at the cemetery, the couple stayed put right through Max’s nine-minute break.

Until, so did the long-hairs.

Worse, early in Max’s nine minutes, the two women started to gripe. Not at Max, not at the young men. At each other. They didn’t exactly gripe; it became a caustic bickering started by the tall one with the duck-tail haircut. Both wooden-faced mad at the other, the lanky one stared out at the cemetery, the small one seeing impenetrable darkness out the other side of the bus. The tall one began to wheedle at the short one, who Max privately regarded as rather lovely in a Katherine Hepburn sort of way.

 “You liked it,” bleated the duck-tail, “You know you liked it.”

“I just didn’t want a scene, Marty.”

“So did she!”

“She didn’t want a scene either.”

“Oh, you know perfectly well what I mean.”

“It was nothing,” the Hepburn’s one’s voice took on a load of disgust, “You’re the one who took me to…”

“It was everything. Oh, you know just how to cut me.” Then Marty’s voice went way down low, “You liked it.”

“I do not like to hurt you.”

“You most certainly do!”

Since they’d just come from Marty’s old fave bar The Other Side of Midnight,  blame was shifted to Marty because the small, lovely woman grievously sniveled that she had been groped there under the Morrison Bridge in the gloom of that loading-dock neighborhood – “in  that filthy restroom!”

The bright lights inside the bus made the clouds of their corrosive bickering shimmer like the Aurora Borealis.

Dave was close enough to see the large right hand of one of the long-hairs was gripping, then un-gripping and re-gripping a stantion pretty tight. He saw P-A-I-N was tattooed on the backs of the fingers just below the knobby knuckles. Dave saw the hand start to fidget.

Dave felt a lonely twinge when softly, Hepburn sighed and they kissed again – and yet again. Barely audibly, tall Marty giggled in the cemetery silence. But when everyone heard her tell the small lovely woman, “I’m really really glad you wore a skirt tonight,” P-A-I-N hissed in agitation, “Shut up! Just shut up!”

Max took his que and cranked the bus engine. They only got a few blocks back toward 82nd before P-A-I-N reached up and grabbed the bell cable and rang several times for the next bus stop. He yelled, “This is where you dykes get off!”

The frightened couple started to their feet, but Max passed the stop.

“I said this is your stop!” P-A-I-N bellowed.

When Max yanked the bus to the curb, standing Dave got thrown sideways into an empty seat. But they were in love for chrissake! He had to get back there. He clutched onto a seat. He hauled himself back into the aisle. His feet hit the floor. He lurched up. Ahead of Max, hauling himself stantion to stantion, Dave shuffled down the aisle.

Nervous, Dave had a hard time with his mouth. Loud as he could, Dave started to chant street names. Counting his cadence with his right hand – “Flavel! Henderson! Knapp! Rural! Bybee!” - Dave grabbed the stantion right next to the long-hairs, asserting himself between them and the couple. Grimmacing, he stood over the young men and chanted-out more streets,

“Cooper! Glenwood! Claybourne! Duke! Tol…”

Neither long-hair ever even got to his feet.

Too fast for Dave to dodge, he saw the P-A-I-N tattoo shoot up into his face. To Dave, the explosion of the punch felt like the MOAB - the Mother of all Bombs. Hard, with a whump, he hit the bus floor.

*               *               *

            Dave just absolutely hated it – being fawned-over. Two EMTs – a man and a woman - were working on him. He was flat on his back in a lit-up, motionless ambulance. He saw his blue raincoat hanging on a hook. Gangly Marty had ahold of his left hand with both of hers. She was rubbing it tenderly. The tiny Hepburn one was massaging Marty’s back – tenderly. The woman EMT’s eyes were moist. The scene was all very tender. Portland Police zoomed up and a grinning Officer with a cut across the bridge of his nose, jumped out and pointed over to his car and told the EMTs, “We got ‘em both!”

            The man EMT handed Dave a sealed envelope. Something rattled inside it. He told Dave, “Sorry about your front teeth, sir.” Dave sighed and thanked the EMT and slid the envelope in his right hip pocket. Waiting outside, the Police Officer’s face had an odd look of admiration. Dave hoped Portland Police would just give him a ride home. There would be nobody there. There never had been. Dave’d tried, really tried to show affection. He really had. Still, he just wanted to go home.

But Dave was worrying that if Marty knew what he was thinking, she might not be rubbing his hand like that. Oh, sure, Dave saw their love. And he’d done, just giving them their Friday night, what he could to make the world leave them be. But Dave knew their incessant griping ate at the softness of their love worse than the world ever could. Once upon a time, Dave believed battleship grey was actually a color, and that the way his wife felt about him was made of plate-steel or rock or concrete. Now, though, Dave was having a hard time with his mouth. Wearily, wearily, his swollen upper lip interfering, Dave looked back and forth between Marty’s and the lovely one’s faces and he told them,

            “Problem with you two is you know everybody’s looking for something. Worse, you don’t know you already found it. See,” he clutched Marty’s sleeve, and with a kind of desperate agitation pulled her close, “You’re just like me. You stayed in the Navy too damn long.”