When An Old Lady Screams F*$% You, You Best Get Out The Way

One day when I was 4 years old, I was out playing in the backyard. I'm not saying there was only one day when I was 4 when I did this, I'm just focusing on one particular day here. I don't remember exactly what I was playing--probably getting into some typical 4 year old mischief like climbing the trees, kicking the soccer ball around or playing "tease the rattlesnake," where you and a group of others take turns trying to provoke a rattlesnake until the point of striking. There were a lot of rattlesnakes around my yard, which kind of makes me wonder why my parents let us play out there alone at age 4 while they were at work all day. No one ever got bit, though which was really lucky, or it could have had to do with the fact that I think they were earthworms and not rattlesnakes. I always get the two mixed up. . . which one do you eat?

Anyway, I was out there harassing rattlesnakes or earthworms, or whatever, and my dad called me over, and told me to sit down and listen. "Son, you're gonna see a lot of things in your life. You're not always going to know what to do, and I can't always be there to hold your hand and tell you how to handle every situation. But there's one thing I can tell you--when and old lady screams F*#@ you, you best get the %&@# out of her way."

After I stopped crying my dad let me get back to playing in the yard, and I never really thought about that day until a couple of weeks ago.

When I'm not living anywhere else, which is most of the time, I live in San Francisco. For those of you who also live in San Francisco, my "neighbs" if you will (shout out here to my original Neighb, who is now also living in San Francisco and my actual Neighb as well), you are likely aware of the 47/49 line Muni buses that travel up and down Van Ness. These buses run the same course from Fisherman's Wharf pretty much all the way to Mission-ish, and then the split off--but for a good chunk of the route, they are interchangeable and so it doesn't matter which one you catch. And as with most of the Muni lines, you get quite an eclectic bunch of fellow passengers when you choose this bus as your means of getting from point A to point B.

This is often one of the joys of public transportation, if you are into the whole people-watching thing, or the whole reflecting-on-how-much-of-an-amazing-testament-it-is-to-the-American-Melting-Pot-that-so-many-different-people-can-coexist-in-such-a-small-area thing, or the whole being-smashed-between-the-short-loud-woman-on-the-cell-phone-and-the-huge-bald-dude-with-B.O.-for-20-blocks thing (I personally enjoy the third one the most--uh . . . ah . . . I mean . . . ).

Anyway, before you get the wrong idea (I don't actually have a bus fetish), back to the wise words that my good old dad had the foresight to pass onto me when I was just a youngster and couldn't appreciate until 20 years later.

One day, I was walking to the bus. Just to clarify again, there wasn't just one day that I was walking to the bus--this happens every day, I'm just focusing on one day in particular here. I was walking to the bus, and I got to the bus stop.

The end.

Ok, just kidding. That would be one of the worst stories ever, and I do mean ever. I mean it has a beginning, technically a middle, and an end, but man, otherwise it just blows. Where's the antagonist? Where's the rising action and the climax? Where is the character development? No, I wouldn't waste your time with that kind of bush-league crap-story. Please forgive me and read on.

So I got to the bus stop, and, as is my custom, I checked that little screen that tells you when the next bus is coming. I forget what it said, I know it was between 5 and 99 minutes, probably more in the ball park of 7 to 11 mins if you forced me to narrow it down. Now, I don't know about you, but I do NOT like waiting at a bus stop for more than 3 minutes tops, especially if I'm only riding it say, 10-15 blocks. At that point, I can usually walk to the place where I am headed and either beat the bus I was waiting for, or get there right at the same time.

And at least walking, you get some exercise and feel productive, can I get an amen? I know there are many of you who would heartily, and possibly violently, disagree with me. And I see your point--it is kind of stupid to try to walk all that way when the bus is clearly on the way, and you don't get there any faster, and you could be sitting rather than walking. But for some reason, to me it just feels like I'm acomplishing something by walking, even if it literally does nothing in the way of saving time. Maybe I should take that as I sign that I need to lead a significantly more productive life, and do whatever version of that I think I should.

If it at all makes it seem less stupid, I usually take it on a stop-by-stop basis, re-evaluating how close the bus is each time--if it is very close, I will actually give in and just wait. This method can backfire, though, if you are cutting it close (like I tend to do) and the bus actually passes you when you are between stops, come to a halt at the stop 20 feet ahead of you, and pulls away right before you are close enough to try to make it. Then, it's like, who has 2 thumbs and feels like a total jack-ass? This guy!

So on this particular day, I saw the bus at my normal stop was 7 minutes away, and I started walking to the next bus stop. I was listening to my ipod and it was early in the day, so by the time made it to the next stop, I was kind of spacing out, probably reminiscing about harassing rattlesnakes and resisting the urge to bust out into the Stand Still and Pump Both Fists Dance to the song I was listening to. By the time I made it to the stop, I was in my own world, barely aware of what was going on around me.

That made my surprise all the more palpable when I heard someone scream "F$@#!!!" at the top of their lungs a single time. No sentance, no string of expletives, just a single F-bomb so loud I heard it over the Eve 6 blasting in my headphones.

I looked around the bus stop, but no one was there but a little old lady sitting on one of the fold-out seats clutching a cane, her little old legs dangling above the cement as they were too short to reach all the way. I remember thinking there was no way that bellowing F&#$ came out of that sweet little 80 year old bat's mouth--it must have been someone from an apartment above that I didn't see.

I shrugged it off as the bus pulled up and we both got ready to board. What you need to know here that buses in San Francisco have the ability to "kneel", i.e. lower hydraulically so that people with disabilities have an easier time boarding. Generally, the driver will do this upon request or when it is blatatntly obvious that the person needs help.

I hopped on first, cause who wants to wait on the curb for an old lady with a cane to get on before you? Now, either the bus was too crowded, or he was in a hurry and not paying total attention, or something, but for whatever reason, the driver just didn't see this lady's cane and the fact that she needed a little extra help getting on. I was about to point it out to him when all of a sudden this tiny, frail, elderly woman screams "Lower the F&%#ing bus you f&$#ing asshole! I need to get on!"

I am not joking or exaggerating this part. Everyone on the bus kind of stopped and looked up at the front, wondering if they actually just heard our driver get shut down by an old bag with a cane. The driver, stunned as everyone else, kind of tried to sputter a pseudo-friendly comment to brush off the insult, like "Hey, sorry, darlin, you know all you got to do is ask."

"I shouldn't have to ask, I'm an old lady," the woman retorted, climbing onto the bus and grabbing an empty seat that had been vactated by a grown man in a suit fearing her wrath and fleeing her path. Most of the time, the story would end there--we would all have been shocked, but laughed about it when we got to work/school and told everyone this minor incident that occurred. But it wasn't over yet, not by a damn sight.

This old lady must have been pissed at this driver or, possibly, she was actually trying to provoke him because she just sat there for 3 blocks saying "you're a F%#@in asshole," over and over again to the driver. Now, I usually get a huge kick out of an unusual and absurd situation like an old lady cussing out a bus driver, so I paused my ipod and paid attention, but I don't think anyone saw what happened next coming.

There was another old lady sitting across from Old-Lady-F-Bomb, and she must have a son that's a bus driver or something because she got really pissed at the cursing old lady, and she said "You need to shut the F%#$ up."

Not phased in the slightest, the first old lady turns on the second one and screams her loudest "Fu@# you!" yet at her. And, not to be outdone by the first old lady with a dirty mouth, the second came back with a hearty "No, F$@% you!"

At this point, I think no one on the bus knew whether to burst out laughing or jump in the middle and try to break up what would have turned out as the slowest rumble in the world. Seriously, what would you have done? Finally, the driver decided he'd had enough of trying to get a grip on the cognitive dissonance of sweet-looking old ladies screaming some heavy-duty profanity, and threw the first old lady off the bus at the next stop.

Not literally--that would have really topped the story off to have seen a fiesty elderly lady get thrown from a moving bus.

In the eerie calm that followed the F-bomb-dropping-old-ladys-ejection, I thought back to that fateful day 20 years earlier that my dad had uttered those words and had to wonder--what the holy hell had happened to him to make me warn me about these situations?

Meditate on that.

Mikee P

Random Stuff:

If you havent seen it yet, check out The Fail Blog at http://failblog.org/. Seriously good time waster at work, and there are some that will make you laugh out loud.

The Best Eve 6 Song, "Anytime," which can be heard here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QwcFu9Kewo. (For more on this band, please refer to my balanced and neutral evaluation in the blog post "Sucks to Be White and Love Dancing" http://whatitissuckafish.blogspot.com/2009/07/sucks-to-be-white-and-love-dancing.html).

Old But Classic Will Ferrell Clip: When he is "The Architect" from the 2003 MTV Movie Awards Introduction--http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ra5-H9ZBS1U&feature=related. A great line, "Ergo . . . concordantly . . . vis a vis. . . you know what, I have no idea what I am saying. I just thought it would make me sound cool."

Another one of my comedic heros, Chris Farley, in my favorite clip of all time: http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?mkt=en-us&tab=soapbox&vid=aec9c00f-a642-459a-9140-4b63f831f251. I miss him.

Everyone's favorite angry old lady--the Wedding Crasher's grandma. She doesn't hold a candle to the one on the bus, though. http://www.entertonement.com/clips/fjxmnzglfq--I-can-do-it-myself-asshole.

Again, please feel free to share random stuff with me. I love a good laugh and a good timewaster.