About three years ago I was on a city bus on the way to one of my adult intramural soccer games. Typically I try to avoid the bus when I can, but on this early evening in Chicago I didn’t have the car and the sports complex hosting my game was west of the el train, so the Chicago Transit bus it was.
Besides the usual crowd of people minding their own business on the way home from work, there was a man in a wheel chair who was restless, unruly and downright obnoxious. He was doing a UFC fighting style play-by-play of the entire bus ride, while sort of telling the driver what to do. Meanwhile he seemed to be warning every one of the perils of the road.
As the CTA bus sped up from 20 miles per hour to a blistering 30 the guy in the wheelchair pipes in and really hits his high notes.
“You almost hit that curb and if you did that guy woulda flown through that windshield and OH that woulda been MESSED UP! Sheeeeit…” Sure, the guy in the wheelchair was exaggerating big time. At 30 miles per hour nobody flies anywhere. But at least this “bus seat driver” was enjoying himself.
A few people got on and a few people got off, and this is typical of the CTA bus and city life. Often people in the big city coexist side by side without paying too much mind to the person next to them. They go about their business and don’t bother with much besides their business. And even though I’ve lived in the city for a decade and a half, maybe the fact that I grew up in the peaceful and (at times) boring suburbs makes me take notice of city’s odd performers. But this guy really wasn’t too hard to notice.
I was playing goal keeper that night for an indoor game, so I used this bus time to tape up my hands. This was something that usually drew a few strange glances since I don’t exactly look like a boxer. But today nobody paid much mind to me since the live entertainment was at the front of the bus.
“You almost hit that dude crossing the street and damn, he woulda went down on the ground and got CRUSHED! That woulda been MESSED UP! DAMN!” Still, nobody seemed to be amused or even fazed except for me. Maybe they were just avoiding eye contact.
We were the stars and cast on a city bus sitcom from Hell.
This guy in the wheel chair didn’t seem to be certifiably crazy, but did, based on his scruffy appearance and dirty clothes, look to be chronically homeless or maybe just one of the city’s more eccentric outcasts. And he wasn’t really bothering anybody individually, just all of us mildly as a collective cast on a sitcom from Hell. But it wasn’t until kids got on the bus that his shtick heightened its colorful language.
The bus got rolling again at regular speed but eventually made an abrupt stop to comply with regular Chicago traffic. Some bike messenger zipped by us, as they’re known to do, cutting in front of the halted bus and then shot between the next lanes to the left.
“If that guy was there a second ago, he woulda got FUCKED UP! On his bike too! BAM!" he said.
“Shut up and watch your language!” the bus driver asserted, “Or get off the bus, OK?,” now getting fed up with the unnecessary antics from this one guy.
Subsequently, the strange play-by-play commentator in the wheelchair took a commercial break and refocused his attention to the boy, maybe 9 or 10 years old, who was sitting nearby with his very old grandmother.
“Do you have a dream, Son? If you do, you gotta follow that dream, Son. Know what I’m sayin’?” he said as the boy feigned disinterest from the awkwardness in the air. Though the play-by-play had stopped for now, this peculiar moment seemed like a staged, uncanny transmission of a sports event with a nightmare broadcaster.
I was wondering if the man actually thought this kid would have any interest in what he had to say. Maybe he should have put a different way, something like, “Follow your dreams son. Or you could end up crazy some day, shouting on a bus like me.”
Luckily for me my stop came up. And as I got off the rear of the bus, two Transit Detail police officers stepped on to escort the commentator off, indicating this hell ride had gone on long enough, well before I got on the bus.
When I got to the field house for my game of footy, I noticed I didn’t have my shin pads, which are required by the officials if you actually want to play. Not a big deal, though. I just exercised the age-old soccer trick of applying semi shin pads made out of a few inches of paper towels from the bathroom and extra tape. But after that, I felt like the loud passenger’s disaster karma followed me from the bus and onto the pitch.
"Welcome to the CTA, home of your play-by-play hell ride."
During warm ups, I fielded a few shots but then took a shot to the groin from Hank, my own team mate. With his customary clinical scoring prowess he hit me square in the balls with painful execution. I got up of the floor feeling dizzy though my head had nothing to do with the collision. And for a moment, I have to admit, I felt totally “messed up”, like my groin itself got hit by that bus.
After the game kicked off, we played reasonably well but fell behind to this team we had beaten handily before. Later in the game bus karma struck again, I took another ball straight to the face from the other team trying to score. I recovered just fine thinking that today was not my day to leave the house.
After 45 minutes on the pitch, we went down 4 to 3 against our opponent, in a long, drawn out, low scoring game. Indoor soccer, like every other sport –-and bus rides too— are unpredictable, and you just have to take and work with what comes your way; meanwhile doing your best to make it a great game.
But at the conclusion of the match, I was wary of more bus hell karma. As you could guess, I decided on the way home I was definitely getting a ride.
Andy Frye writes about sports and life here and tweets throughout the day on Twitter at @MySportsComplex.
He recovered just fine from both warm ups and the bus ride.
Written words © 2011. Pics courtesy of ebaumsworld.com. CTA bus art depiction by the late schizophrenic rapper/artist Wesley Willis.
