July 28, 2006

• Bus A Move

  The other day I was waiting at the bus stop at 125th and Lake City Way. The 75 was due to arrive in about ten minutes. Under the shelter was a couple trying to escape the heat; they were wondering if the 65 went to Matthews Beach, which it doesn’t, so I told them they wanted the 75.

  There was a strange, tall, oriental-looking gentleman, with a very worried look on his face and coke-bottle glasses. Dressed all in black, with a ten-year-old laptop briefcase. He eyed everyone suspiciously. There was also a rather large man with a bag of groceries, a box of breakfast cereal conspicuously poking out the top. He looked beaten down, red-faced, in need of a big glass of water. He waited a full fifteen minutes for the bus to arrive, and then when it came, he rode it three blocks and got off.

  But that’s not what this story is about. It’s about the pathos-inducingly wiry guy, maybe 20 or a little younger, wearing an iPod and track shorts and muscle shirt and wrap-around mirrorshades. He might have been albino; he was certainly pale and he had white hair. He glanced at me, and I glanced back, and gave him a nod of howdy, and he nodded back. And then he occupied the sidewalk, there in the shade of the three-storey Washington Mutual buildling with dancing.

  He was obviously listening to Michael Jackson’s ‘Billie Jean.’ He enacted the whole music video through dance, singing out some of the words. Wiry white guy acting like his own iPod commercial. He wasn’t such a bad dancer. He’d twirl around, grab his crotch, do a moonwalk, spin around again, do that little yelp that Jackson does in the song…

  The couple under the shelter were amused. They started laughing. I don’t think they intended to be cruel, either. People don’t just start dancing, so they were stunned. The all-in-black man shied away to the other side of the universe. The big guy just sighed. I was grinning, and started watching the people in the cars stopped at the stoplight.

  They were watching this guy dance. Some were laughing at him, some were diggin’. Dude had created a scene, trading in the currency of a song and a video everyone was familiar with, but which no one could actually see or hear at the moment. They could only remember, their memory jogged by semi-capable dance moves seen at a bus stop.

  The bus came. He moonwalked to the door and climbed in. He ended up sitting right next to the couple who had been trying to escape the heat at the beach.

  Later, he took out the ear buds and said, out loud, to whoever was listening: “I really love hot days like today.” Reply: “Yeah, makes me feel like dancing.”

  • 1:54 pm
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