It’s coming!

Is it coming? Can you see it? You wander out into the street. You kind of have to to see far enough. Is it the 186 or the 93? Is it cruelly displaying “Out Of Service?” Is it early? Is it late? Oh, there it is. Yes!!! It’s the right bus. Here it is, pulling up. Shit, the doors are thirty feet behind us where that new guy is standing. Oh well, you make your way to the door and jump on. You flash your pass to the driver and sit down in the back. Always the back.

The bus has had an outsized role in my life, more in the past than in recent years, admittedly. I took school buses, Greyhounds, and city buses in Sacramento and Los Angeles almost constantly until I was about sixteen years old. Sure, I’ve taken the odd bus here and there since then, and I have a few things to say about those journeys as well, but most of my bus-riding adventures happened when I was a kid and a young teen. I’ve already written about the time my friend Bill got hit by a bus and survived, so I won’t retell that tale here.

Jump on and take a ride with me?

First Stop – Dragun Drive

My first memory of any kind of bus was taking a Greyhound up to Oregon with my mom to visit relatives. I was obsessed with one of my toys, the Shogun Warrior, Dragun. I would have been about six years old – likely the summer before I turned seven – and Dragun was a full 24 inches tall, so roughly half my height, and it was made entirely of inflexible hard plastic. Dragun was a rigid warrior: only his arms moved at the shoulder. Although he could shoot ninja stars and had buzzsaws in his forearms, he was otherwise immobile.

Dragun and I were inseparable, and my mom, amazing woman that she was, could not say no to her baby boy when he begged to take Dragun on the Greyhound bus for the ten-hour journey to Roseburg. Dragun could not be packed, he could not be cuddled, he could not be tucked away. Dragun just WAS.

My mom told this story often: We found a seat at the front of the bus near the driver so I could see out the big front window. Nearly everyone who got on the bus would do a double-take of this tiny child with his enormous mythical Japanese warrior toy. I talked a lot back then. A LOT. The bus left the Sacramento station and the hours rolled steadily by. I yammered on for all of these hours, then eventually fell asleep. After about five minutes of silence, the bus driver looked wearily at my mother and said “Little fella finally tired himself out, huh?” But in an exasperated manner that seemed to express, “Little fella finally shut the fuck up, huh, lady?” My mom got a big kick out of that story, like it was the funniest thing she’d ever heard. It was as if the bus driver was pronouncing on behalf of the front third of the bus that heaven must be thanked for this insufferable chatterbox and his plastic warrior finally tiring out. It doesn’t sound so funny or interesting as I write about it now. But that was my first memory of the bus, and if my mom was still around she’d tell the story better than me.

Second Stop – Shame Circle, or, The Babysitter

My next regular bus rides were from Pony Express elementary school to my babysitter’s house. This was in the first year or two after my parents divorce, so I put myself at seven or eight years old. It was one of the long yellow school buses, and I don’t have much memory of it except once they did a news story about something related to my school, and they filmed the bus driving away. I hung out the window like a dork waving at the cameraman and making a funny face. I was overjoyed when I saw myself on KCRA “Where the News Comes First” that night at 5:00.

I would have been in second or third grade then. My mom lived in a rental duplex near Reichmuth Park in the South Land Park area, and my dad still lived in the house where I grew up in the South South Land Park area near Z’Berg Park. I don’t fully remember my mom’s house/dad’s house schedule back then, but I regularly did some school bus riding to or from from one or both of those places. The main thing I remember is getting dropped off near my dad’s house at a babysitter’s.

The babysitter seemed like a very elderly woman to me, but she could have been forty. She had two daughters, one younger than me and one older, and she babysat lots of kids of all ages after school each weekday. Her backyard was bordered with white decorative rocks—the real jagged kind. There was a swing set back there too, and lots of other play stuff. It wasn’t a licensed daycare or anything, just a lady looking to make a few extra bucks. As I recall, the older daughter, maybe nine or ten, did plenty of the childcare herself, as least for the little ones.

There was a kid there named Adam, around three years old. The school bus dropped me off one Autumn afternoon, I made my way inside, dropped off my little denim backpack with my name stitched on it, and headed out back as usual, finding no one there but Adam. I was fooling around on the swing set while Adam was across the yard in the border between the lawn and the fence, playing with the decorative rocks. He started throwing a couple of the rocks, and eventually pretended he was throwing them at me. His chubby little three-year-old hands couldn’t propel the rocks more than a few feet in a weak arc in front of him. He was yelling at me – not in a mean or angry way, but in a fun, playing way – that he was throwing rocks at me. I saw his pathetic attempts to throw a rock at me and I thought I’d show him how it was done. I found a rock from my own side of the yard and hurled it in his direction. I was unaware that I possessed the velocity and accuracy of Nolan Ryan at seven or eight years old, but as Adam was fooling around on his side of the yard, gathering up more rocks, my projectile from 30 feet away blasted him square in the mouth. His face exploded.

He didn’t know it was coming. The poor little guy looked up at me from his task, gathering a new rock in his tiny mitt, and a jagged projectile nailed him in the kisser with the force of a bullet. He entire face was immediately covered in blood and he began to scream. He ran over toward the covered back porch, shrieking. I sheepishly followed, thinking maybe I could go grab a rag or dish towel and clean the tyke up. But his screams brought the babysitter’s two daughters out to the porch, and the older one – this is a distinct memory – covered her face in her hands in horror, and screamed. How many times have you seen someone literally cover his or her face in horror, screaming, movies aside? It happened that day.

Adam seemed to become freaked out by the babysitter’s daughter’s reaction. He ran across the back porch, dripping blood everywhere, screwed up his little face, stopped breathing, and passed out flat on the concrete floor. This busted his nose open, and then the poor kid was more blood than face. The babysitter’s daughters were now both screaming and this is where my memory conveniently takes a break.

I don’t know who came to help the kid. If memory serves, the babysitter was sometimes busy with other matters (or maybe not home at all? Or picking up other charges from school?) so I can’t say for sure she was home during Adam’s injury. Again, my memory stops here and picks up later. Somehow Adam was cared for and taken to the hospital. I remember someone sitting me down. The babysitter? The kid’s parents? My parents? Some other adult? It’s lost to history, but some adult asked me what happened. I’d like to say I did some soul searching at this moment. That I had an angel and a devil appear on my young shoulders. That I weighed the right path versus the wrong path. But I did no such thing. I lied. I lied as easily as I’d drink a glass of water on a hot day. “I don’t know.” “I just looked over and he was crying.” “I don’t know if he fell on those rocks or what.” “I ran over to see what was going on when he ran to the porch, and that’s when the babysitter’s daughters ran out too.” So that’s it. I lied. And I never got caught. To my knowledge, I wasn’t even suspected. I certainly never intended to hurt the little guy, but I was a rambunctious, rough-and-tumble boy. I loved climbing too high in trees and jumping bikes and throwing rocks and lighting firecrackers and honestly anything that seemed extreme or dangerous to my young mind.

I felt guilty, but more so I felt relieved that I wasn’t caught. Adam showed back up at the babysitter’s a week or so later with stitches. He may carry that scar to this day. I remember watching The Three Stooges with him, as he wasn’t allowed out back anymore. Curly got bonked in the face with something by Moe when Adam turned to me, laughing (apparently he didn’t remember how he got the injury) and said “he like me got boo-boo from the rock.”

I immediately diverted his attention and the conversation to something less accusatory. And that was it. The yellow school bus drove me to this babysitter’s every day, and I experienced one of the most shameful and guilt-ridden moments of my life. I went on to have many more bus-related adventures of which I am less than proud.

Third Stop – Latona Ave., East L.A.

About a year after my assault and battery of an innocent three-year-old, my mom remarried and I moved with her from Sacramento to Los Angeles. It was a difficult transition, leaving my friends, my dad, and my adult sisters in Northern California. I started fourth grade in a new school in North Hollywood: Burbank Blvd School.

I moved at the most unfortunate time of year: the beginning of summer. I spent those endless weeks between third and fourth grades alone in a new house in Southern California. I had a new fourteen-year-old stepbrother, Mark: a really good dude with his own stuff going on. My mom, weirdly, immediately became my new stepfather’s secretary for his private practice law firm, a firm with typically one but occasionally two attorneys. My mom and my new stepdad were gone all day, my new teenage stepbrother was sometimes around sometimes not, and I was left alone in a weird house in a strange city for three months before school started in September.

Fittingly, I was yelled at for watching TV on these interminable days, and was encouraged to “Go ride your bike around and make friends!” I wasn’t sure how that was supposed to work, but my new stepbrother was instructed to lock me out of the house for first two, then later four, hours every day to “ride my bike around and make friends.” I don’t think Mark liked his new job as correctional officer – it messed up his plans too – but yes, I was locked out of the house for two, then four, hours every day. My stepfather had been my age in 1950 in New York City, so life was all outside and Spaldeens and stickball and chewin’ gum and sody fountains or some bullshit. It was different in the suburbs of Los Angeles in the 1970’s.

I rode my bike for hours and hours and hours. And no, I didn’t make any friends. I didn’t see a kid and magically become besties with him or her. I suffered. I wasn’t allowed to watch TV. But eventually school started. Don’t worry, I’ll get to the bus soon.

Mercifully, the day after Labor Day arrived, and I was shown the route to walk to my new school on Burbank Blvd. I was told by my parents “Go into the office, and they will tell you where your classroom is.” Why an adult didn’t accompany me on my first day of school in a new city is beyond me, but that’s just the way things were back then, at least in my family. I walked the route I had memorized to the school, made my way to the office, and spoke to someone there. “Hello, I’m a new student here. Yes, Chip Powell, that’s my name. OK, your list says I am to be in room 12? OK, thank you. Where is that, please? OK, I’ll find it. Thank you.” Of course it was now seven minutes after 8:00 and class was fully in session when I made may way through the door of room 12. It was like the juke box in a honky tonk screeching to a stop when a stranger walks in the door. All eyes were upon me. I told the teacher, “Hello, I’m supposed to be in your class.” “No, she said, I don’t see your name on my list.” “I’m new,” I said, “I just moved here.” “Sorry,” she said, “Maybe try next door in room 10.” “OK,” I replied. This was some fucking bullshit. I knew it was bullshit then and I feel it just as acutely now, nearly fifty years later. The humiliation is crystal clear to me almost a half-century later.

I went to room 10. Same juke box screeching to a stop. Same wide eyes of 25 nine-year-olds. “Hello, am I in your class?” “No,” the room 10 teacher said. “I don’t see your name on my list.” “I’m new,” I said. “I just moved here.” “Sorry,” she said. “Maybe try next door in room 12,” (from where I had just come.) “OK,” I replied, and I walked out of room 10. What in the actual fuck was going on here! I was eight years old, almost nine, and trying my damndest to start fourth grade. I left room 10 and walked down the hallway – I remember this so vividly – and opened two double doors that led to the blacktop and Burbank Blvd. and the street that I walked down to get here. Most of me wanted to keep walking, go down that street, and go home. I had failed. This school didn’t want me. I may as well spend another day sneaking in television and riding my bike around. But I knew – I *knew* – that my mom and stepdad would raise holy hell when they got home from work. I knew they would be angry at me – at least my stepdad would be. My mom would have had some sympathy. I foresaw tomorrow, my mom marching me back to school and ripping every employee and teacher and student there ten new assholes for fucking over her baby boy who was new in town. Well, I didn’t want to be a part of that embarrassing scene, so after this premonition flashed through my mind in the ten seconds I stood looking out at the blacktop and the boulevard beyond it, I closed the double doors and about-faced.

I went back to room 12. Same juke box screeching to a stop. “The teacher in room 10 didn’t have me on her list either.” “OK,” Mrs. Jones said, sympathetically, “I’ll take you. Have a seat over there.” And there I was. In Mrs. Jones’ class for the first semester of fourth grade.

What did the bus have to do with this all? Not much, yet. However, I noticed that many students in my middle-class white/Latino neighborhood school seemed to arrive on yellow buses every morning. Lots and lots and lots of kids from several buses. Where the hell were all these kids coming from, I wondered? I found out: East L.A. In the 1970’s, court decisions – in an effort to desegregate poorer, blacker and browner neighborhoods – resulted in dozens, maybe hundreds, of new kids, mainly Latino, coming from East L.A. to Burbank Blvd. School. And to other schools all over the city. What I didn’t realize was that some number – maybe not an equal number, but some number – of local North Hollywood kids were being bused in exchange to East L.A. And my turn would come the in the second semester of fourth grade. So there I was, standing on the corner of St Clair and Emelita streets in January of 1979, seven months after I moved from Pony Express Elementary in Sacramento, and four months since I began Burbank Blvd School in North Hollywood, waiting in the cold at 7:00 a.m. for a bus to take me to Latona Ave. School in East L.A.

The bus driver was a young woman named Mrs. Mejia, and the 45 minute ride took me through parts of Los Angeles I’d never seen: The 5 through Glendale and Griffith Park, to the 110 through Montecito Heights. Factories, railroad yards, graffiti of gangs I’d never heard of, I was wide-eyed traveling down Avenue 43 to my new elementary school. It was a poorer, almost entirely Latino part of L.A., but kids are kids, and schools are schools, and I had no problems in Mr. Montejano’s class. I met two good friends there: David and Ronnie. They lived in the local neighborhood, and we stayed friends for a few years after that.

A little more than two years later, right at the end of sixth grade, the three of us met up again at David’s house and from there we hit the streets. We had a foolproof shoplifting technique which involved walking into the local Alpha Beta supermarket cradling and open, but empty, paper sack. We filled the sack with various and sundry goods – I specifically remember a jar of pickles and a hammer – and then waltzed right out. I don’t know what we needed pickles and a hammer for, but now we had them. For free! We wound up back at our old elementary school, Latona Ave. School, where that big yellow bus took me every day two years prior. This being a Saturday, we jumped the fence. We had also acquired – not from the Alpha Beta, I can’t remember from where – a 40 oz. bottle of Budweiser and some marijuana. I had never drank nor smoked before, but we did that day and had a blast. I liked it too much, and that started me down a rough road for the next few years. Those are stories for another time, though. David and I stayed friends for several years before we lost touch. He was a good guy, and I wonder if we’d still like each other today. Probably. Maybe. We had lots of further adventures together, and we met because of a long, yellow school bus.

But back then, in fourth grade, there I was standing on the corner of St Clair and Emelita at 7:00 every morning to wait for this bus. There were two sixth-graders on the bus named Frankie and Johnny. At first I thought they were funny, cool, older dudes. But they didn’t think I was funny nor cool and began picking on me mercilessly. It was mostly a lot of shit talk, but one time one of them hit me over the head with an empty Coke bottle. It didn’t break, but it hurt like hell. I told them I had an older stepbrother who was 15 and who would beat the shit out of them if they touched me again. They weren’t sure whether to believe me about Mark or not. Mark wasn’t a thug or anything, but I felt sure he could at least help rid me of these yahoos. Mark was nowhere near St. Clair and Emelita at 7:00 in the morning or 3:00 in the afternoon, but if memory serves, once he picked me up from the bus stop in the family’s Chevy Caprice, so the hated Frankie and Johnny at least got a look at him and knew he was real. There were no more bottles to the head after that.

Then in 5th grade I stayed at Burbank Blvd School for the entire year while kids from East L.A. continued to get bused in. Weirdly, for 6th grade I was bused to a rich kid public school in Studio City on Carpenter Ave. (Simpler times, when schools were just named after the streets they resided on, presciently choosing to stay neutral in the culture wars that would dominate American society in the coming decades.) How did I go from a kid whose school was so “good” and so “white” that poor Latino kids from East L.A. needed to be bused there, to being the same kid in the same house at the same school needing to escape my brutal surroundings to see how the rich kids lived? Three schools in three grades, and I never moved nor left the district. However, at Carpenter I met Chad, Tony, and Brian, and we’re lifelong friends over forty years later. They were all bused to Carpenter Ave. too, from different schools, so I guess busing did some good!

Fourth Stop – Junior Hijinx Highway

Finally I started junior high at Walter Reed Junior High School in North Hollywood, and miraculously I stayed at that same school for three years for 7th through 9th grades.

Walter Reed Junior High enjoyed a bit of notoriety in 2008 when presidential candidate John McCain referenced the wounded veterans at the renowned Walter Reed military medical center in Washington D.C., and behind him at the Republican National Convention a giant photo of my junior high school in North Hollywood, California was displayed. We Reed alums snickered and scoffed at this gaffe on a nascent Facebook, some of us sure this meant McCain was in no way suited for the highest office in the land. Oh, sweet, summer child, if only you knew how fetid and malignant a Republican president could be. I’d trade a thousand years of John McCain now if it meant zero more years of the malignant cancer of an orange clown we would all sadly come to know.

Those years at Reed coincided with my descent into drug and alcohol abuse, accompanied by no small measure of destructive debauchery. I won’t recount here how my buddies and I burned an apartment complex to the ground (it was abandoned and slated for demolition), or terrorized fellow students with loogies and violence, or stole anything we could get our hands on, or broke and destroyed everything that appeared before us. But I will tell you about the bus.

There were a number of buses that could get me to and from Walter Reed. Sometimes I’d just walk the two-plus miles, sometimes I’d take one or two city buses, L.A.’s famed RTD: Rapid Transit District, as it was called back then. We bought bus passes from the Reed office for four dollars a month. How many kids had not the foresight to acquire next month’s pass in the waning days of the current month? Most of us. How many of us spent the four dollars our parents gave us on marijuana or cigarettes? Many of us. The remedy to this was having your friend enter the bus first in the crowd of twenty or thirty, run to the back of the bus, slide the window open – yes, bus windows opened then – sneak his or her pass to you, then you strode on with the last group of kids. A thumb covering half the photo did the trick.

I rode the bus home from school more often than I rode it to school in the mornings. The mornings were boring, and there was no one to wait at the local bus stop with, so I walked a lot. My mom drove me sometimes, to be fair, dropping me off a respectable two blocks away from campus. But the afternoons were when the freaks came out. Dozens of stoners would flee the high school at 2:56 p.m., scattering whichever way the universe demanded. If I wasn’t heading straight to Tony’s after school to smoke weed, I’d join my fellow stoners in whichever way the wind blew. Maybe we’d head to Dale’s Jr. to steal cartons of Marlboros before getting on the RTD. Maybe we’d head North up Colfax to the wall where we’d like to hang out, and graffiti it with fat Marks-A-Lot felt pens. Maybe we’d daredevil across the L.A. river on the wrong side of the fence, defying certain death – no hyperbole. Maybe we’d end up at the bus stop on Riverside, where a kid once lit a notebook on fire and threw it into a big blue U.S. mailbox, burning it up and everything inside it. Maybe I’d stand on a trash can and pretend to preach the gospel in the loudest voice possible to my fellow stoners and any other poor citizen who walked by, or writhe and scream on the ground in a mock epileptic fit. We’d smoke cigarettes, smoke weed, drink if anyone had booze, blast Quiet Riot and Ratt and Judas Priest out of our boom boxes. We were young, beautiful, and free. And it was a terror when we got on the bus.

I remember us getting kicked off the RTD en masse more times than I can count, for pulling the same kinds of shenanigans as at the bus stop. But the bus also afforded us some perceived anonymity when it came with fucking with cars that would pass us. Those were the old buses, as I mentioned previously: the windows slid open a certain amount. First we started throwing whatever was leftover from our lunches into the open car windows next to us at a stoplight. I have a clear memory of my orange bouncing around on some unsuspecting dude’s lap as he had the misfortune of leaving his window open next to a bus near a junior high. We’d slam the window closed at the last second before the hapless commuter looked up, utterly baffled at where a bouncing orange came from. Peanut butter sandwiches, opened half-pint milk cartons, and fruit were frequent ammunition. We did finally get kicked off the bus when two of our passions inevitably came together: smoking and throwing stuff into cars. Yes, we would sneak smokes on the bus, and one day I threw a lit cigarette butt clean into a car’s open window.

We were evil, pure evil. And we loved every minute of it. Also, I would be tempted to beat the holy hell out of any kid who threw some shit into my car today. Such is life.

Fifth Stop – Shell Game Shores

I was playing video games at the 7-Eleven at Oxnard and Laurel Canyon near my house when I met a dude at the bus stop right outside the store. I was fourteen or fifteen at the time, and he seemed twenty-five but could have been thirty-five I suppose. He was a friendly, fast-talking black dude, tall-ish, slender, with a wispy beard and sparkling eyes. I forget how the conversation started, but I learned quickly he was a master of the shell game. He didn’t use shells, but small bottle caps – not from a beer or soda bottle, but some other kind, unridged – and a small foam ball that just barely fit under the caps. He was alone, and asked me if I thought I could correctly identify which cap the foam ball was under as he shuffled the caps around, using a folded Time magazine as a table on the bus stop bench.

I had guessed correctly two or three times when he asked me if I wanted to put any money on it. I was suspicious, but I also felt I had an uncanny ability to find the ball no matter how fast he moved the caps around. He produced a fat stack of cash, saying nothing, but clearly showing me that I could win as much money as I wanted to wager. My spidey senses started tingling, and I told him I didn’t have any money. I can’t remember now if this was true or not. We kept talking about this and that, and eventually started smoking weed together, whether mine or his is lost in the blur of four decades. It’s just how I operated back then. If I liked you and you liked me, whether guy, girl, teen, adult, cousin, stranger… we’d eventually be smoking weed together.

He introduced himself as Reggie, and he asked me if I wanted to know a secret. He showed me his stack of cash and revealed that most of it was cut newspaper pieces with a twenty on the outside, a couple of fives under that, and then several ones surrounding the news print. Reggie made thirty-six dollars look like hundreds, maybe a grand. It was an incredible illusion! He told me it was a good thing I didn’t wager on the cap trick because he never lost. He showed me how he tucked the ball into his pinky at the last second as it seemed to come to rest under a certain cap, only to then be spirited under a different cap, or potentially even remaining in his hand. He showed me that even if the ball was under a certain cap – he put his hands in his pockets and let me triple check that the ball was under the middle cap – by the time he himself lifted the cap, he could swipe the ball at that time and have it pop up under a different cap. He let me examine all the caps and the ball to prove there were no hidden compartments or sticky stuff involved.

I had always been fascinated by magic and did some simple card tricks myself, but Reggie exhibited pure virtuosity. It got late as we finished our joint and I said I’d better be heading home. Reggie suggested I meet him at the same bus stop bench the next evening to hang out and help him with his “work.” He said he’d give me 25% of whatever he made over the course of the evening. I wouldn’t have to do anything but just hang out with him and follow his lead. He said he’d have a couple of joints on him, too.

He didn’t have to twist my arm too hard. Smoke weed and hang out with a cool guy and make money? Yes, please! I met him the next evening at about 5:00. We jumped on the bus and headed down to the area where the UA movie theaters used to be on Victory Blvd. There were massive outdoor shopping complexes in that area, and it was right near a kind of narrow park that shouldered up against the L.A. River, AKA the concrete water runoff channels that snake through the region. We smoked a joint in the park, then walked through a parking lot behind some restaurants. As we walked he told me to always look at his right hand. If I was ever guessing a cap, he said to look at his right hand for how many fingers were holding down the folded magazine on which he would run the game. That number – one, two, or three – was the cap I should guess, and it didn’t matter how many fingers were on the other hand. Whether I thought it was right or wrong, follow the fingers. He also handed me a ten dollar bill.

Being stoned, I was desperately trying to hold this information in my mind. We saw a group of twenty-somethings coming out of a car, getting ready to go into one of the restaurants when Reggie starts talking to me and gesticulating wildly. We veered in the direction of the group of diners, as if we were going somewhere else, when Reggie loudly regaled me in an almost staccato designed not to be examined too closely. “Damn it, how many times I got to tell you, man, ten don’t get you twenty! Ten is never gonna get you twenty. You want a two time you gotta play the double and I don’t make the rules, man!” I didn’t know how to respond to this; I didn’t know the line was even coming. I remembered the most important rule though: Follow his lead. I shrugged, as if to say “Yeah, man, whatever…” Reggie enlisted the diners’ help. “Hey, can somebody tell this dude ten don’t get you twenty?” They paused, not sure what the guy was talking about, and the pause was all he needed.

“Look,” Reggie demonstrated, laying out the Time magazine on the hood of a nearby Buick Regal. “Ten don’t get you twenty, no way you slice it. You follow, right, man?,” addressing a brown-haired guy in the group, as he laid out his caps. “Check it.” Reggie began his trick, moving the ball from one cap to another. Fast, but not too fast to follow. “Now, show me,” he told me, as he held down the magazine with two fingers on his right hand and three fingers on his left. Wait, was I supposed to look at the left or the right? I was pretty high, but I also felt confident I needed to look at Reggie’s right hand. I pointed to the middle cap, but the ball clearly seemed to be under cap number one. “Sorry, wrong again!” He gestured at me and I handed him the ten dollar bill he had given me in the park. He added it to his fake wad, flashing it to the crowd. “And ten don’t get you twenty. Especially if you guess wrong. Somebody tell this dude!”

Reggie had the group’s curiosity, but now he had their attention, as they say. They all saw the ball under cap number one, while I, a common teenage stoner, a pure inferior, was too dumb to see it and guessed cap number two instead. “Look, you want to try? Five dollars, but that only gets you five, not ten!” The brown-haired guy was practically drooling. He agreed and ripped open his Velcro wallet to produce a five dollar bill. One of the girls said “Mike, don’t, let’s just go eat,” but Mike was sure he was about to make some money. The taller blonde guy and his date were into it too. Reggie did his thing, Mike guessed the middle cap, and viola! He guessed right and Reggie pulled a five off of the cash stack. Before he handed it to Mike he said, “OK, OK, gimme a chance to get my money back. Double or nothing!” Mike agreed, and then shockingly added “I’ll go twenty,” and the taller blonde guy said “Yeah, I got twenty on it also.” Reggie said “Forty, huh?” and appraised his fat stack, warily. “OK, I can cover that. Let’s try again.”

He moved the ball and caps around like a wizard. I could follow the ball, but it wasn’t overly simple. However, if one paid fairly close attention, one could follow it. It seemed to come to rest under the third cap. I was 95% sure, but I also knew Reggie by this point. “Number 3!” both Mike and blonde guy shouted, pointing at the third cap toward the right of the folded magazine, right along side their forty dollars. Reggie lifted the cap and… nothing. “Sorry, guys.” He lifted the middle cap and there was the foam ball. He snatched up the two twenties and asked them if they wanted to play again? The men hemmed and hawed, then started to get pissed. Walking casually yet somewhat briskly away, Reggie said to me for all to hear, “See, like I said, twenty get you twenty but twenty don’t get you forty. How many time I got to tell you?” All I heard behind me was some grumbling and then a girl saying “Mike, you’re such a fucking idiot!”

OK, forty bucks for five minutes of work. I understood completely. I couldn’t shuffle the caps and tuck the ball like Reggie did, but I felt better about being the shill. As we moved on into the night, I was flying on wings made of five and ten dollar bills. Remember, this was 1984, and a ten-spot could buy you a weekend movie ticket AND a good trip to McDonald’s and you’d still have plenty of quarters left over for the arcade. I was happy. I didn’t care that these people lost their money to a con man (and to me). I was ecstatic to have made a little extra cash. My moral compass back then… well, let’s say it just didn’t exist.

We found a similar group later in the parking lot behind a different restaurant: a few guys and girls in their late teens. One dude took a look at Reggie and said “Oh no. No, no, no, no NO!” Reggie replied, “Hey man, we’re all good. My man and I are just rolling through and I was trying to tell him that ten don’t get you twenty. You remember that much!” “No way,” the guy replied. He was short-ish, curly black hair, and wore glasses. “You took forty dollars from me last time.” “You watch the ball better, you won’t lose. Like I was telling my man here,” Reggie said as he laid out the Time magazine on an Oldsmobile 98’s trunk. His focus was only on me. “Let me give you a chance to get that ten back. Not twenty!” pointing his finger at me accusingly, “Ten!” He shuffled the caps while the new group stopped to watch. I followed the ball to the first cap while Reggie put down one finger on the magazine. I pointed, “That one.” “Damn!” Reggie said. He peeled off a ten and handed it to me. “I gotta brush up. I think I’m done for the night,” and started to fold up the magazine and throw the caps back in his pocket.

“Wait,” said Glasses. “Look,” said Reggie, “If you ain’t no better than last time you’re just gonna lose your money again. I don’t care if I’m off or if I’m on.” “No, man, I’m gonna get that forty back you got from me last week.” “OK,” Reggie replied reluctantly, and he set the magazine back on the trunk of the Olds. “You want to just go ten or twenty?” “No, let’s go forty.” A girl piped up, “Derek, you only have forty and we’re going to eat and to the movies.” “No, I got this!” Derek assured her and the rest of the group, as he laid his twenties on the car hood. “I was high last week, I got this motherfucker now.” Reggie moved the ball around under the caps. It seemed to me it rested under the middle cap, but I was already feeling badly for Derek. “The middle one!” he announced, triumphantly. “Are you sure?” Reggie said. “I’ll give you one chance to change your mind.” Derek was steadfast, assuring us all that he was skilled enough to see that the ball clearly came to rest under the middle cap. He was right, of course, but none of us could ever see Reggie whisk the ball away in the crook of his little finger. At that moment the ball wasn’t under any cap at all, so when Reggie lifted the middle cap, showing no ball, then lifted cap one with the ball shoved under it in the very act of lifting the cap, Derek was crestfallen, and his friends groaned. “You told us about this guy last week, how could you lose your only forty dollars?” the same girl asked Derek, as he stared on, heartbroken and disbelieving. He *saw* that ball go under the middle cap, as did I, as did the rest of us. He fatal flaw was that he didn’t know he was dealing with a highly-skilled con man and his accomplice.

“Man, that was my only money. I can’t go eat with my friends or go to the movies now.” Derek was nearly crying. “Can we go double or nothing?” “Sure,” Reggie answered, “If your friends want to put up the forty.” They all groaned, muttering things like “No way,” and “No thank you,” and “It’s a con.” Derek choked back tears as we strolled away. This time I felt badly. Not badly enough to do anything, however. I strode back into the night with Reggie, wrestling with some conflicting emotions, but losing the battle, as always.

Eventually Reggie and I found another bus stop and hopped on, heading back toward the neighborhood where we both lived. We moved to the back of the bus where Reggie unfolded the magazine and began to start his game with me as the shill for the sake of the passengers back there. The bus driver immediately clocked what was going on, pulled the bus over, walked to the back and yelled at us to get the hell off his bus and quit trying to con people. Seems like bus drivers witness a lot of stuff, and some of them try to stop bullshit before it even starts.

Reggie and I provided light protestation but got off the bus nevertheless. We walked the remaining mile and a half home, smoked another joint, and he gave me my cut of the night. We had had some other wins over the course of the evening, so my share was thirty dollars, which would have been well over twice minimum wage during those years for three hours work. We made loose plans to get together and do it again, but I never saw Reggie after that night.

Sixth Stop – Big Mouth Boulevard

This being the bus of memory, nostalgia, and whimsy, we now move through time over a decade to my mid-twenties in East Sacramento. I rode the bus to work each day back then. I typically sat in the back, reading a book, and minding my business, no longer tempted to throw things into passing cars. One day I overheard a loud woman at the front of the bus complaining about a low-level State of California employee being sent to New York City for a “conference” last fall. Well, I was that low-level employee, and I recognized the loudmouth at the front of the bus as a woman named Deborah from my agency’s accounting department. I was pissed that she was talking shit, and so publicly. I worked then at a place that was notoriously tight-lipped. I mentioned this to the director of the agency – to whom I was somewhat close, personally, at that time, working at a desk right near his office – about Deborah talking shit about our business, loudly, on a busload of people.

The backstory on Deborah and me was that we had minor beef going back a couple of years. She had lobbied to get me pulled off of a job I had been happily and successfully doing, and our director – to whom I was fairly close at that time, too – weirdly acquiesced. He was a Machiavellian cat, and he knew that Deborah was actually requesting a rope to hang herself. Said rope was delivered two years later when the director sent me to New York City with his executive assistant for a conference, and Deborah had to process the travel expenses. It apparently chapped her hide, this travel on the company’s dime (Hey, it was a great conference and I learned a lot!) leading to her outburst on the bus. After I ratted her out, the director called her into his office. This must have seemed weird to her because he didn’t directly oversee the Accounting department. You could hear him shouting at her, and you knew his forehead veins were bulging; this was nothing new. As she left, red-faced and teary eyed, she stared daggers at me and said “I know it was you who told him!” I shrugged, as if to say, If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.

The director himself had his own war against the Accounting and HR departments, who nominally reported to the head of a different, related, agency. Deborah got fired for unrelated embezzlement or financial malfeasance within the year, and I moved up the ranks after college graduation, making a nice (and honest) career for myself. If not for the J Street bus, things might have been different for all of us.

Seventh Stop – Foot Fetish Freeway

Around the time of Junior Hijinx Highway above, when we middle school hooligans would cause trouble on the RTD riding home from school, we noticed that a very odd fellow would ride our line at times. Today you may say he was autistic or developmentally disabled. I don’t remember being especially mean to him or calling him names (it wouldn’t be past us), but there was one thing we did to him that we thought hilarious, but certainly others would think cruel. I look back know, and I don’t know quite what to think. I definitely lean toward cruel.

He had a foot fetish. He must have been mid-twenties, having a large forehead, thick Buddy Holly glasses, and curly black hair. He wore a white polo shirt and did nothing but stare at the feet of whoever sat across from him. He didn’t look around the bus, he didn’t read a magazine, he didn’t look out the window, he didn’t talk to anyone. He just stared at other people’s feet. One day I suggested to our friend Katie that she should take off her shoe. It was a checkered Vans slip-on with Motley Crue written in Sharpie on the midsole of the right shoe, and Ozzy on the midsole of the left. She took off one of them and the man’s eyes widened dramatically. We had never seen any change in his affect before this, so it was really something. She raised her socked foot up in the air a bit from the other side of the aisle – the seats toward the rear of the bus faced each other – and our man watched with laser focus. She moved her foot right, then left, and he followed with his huge eyes like a cat watching a mouse just out of reach. Katie put her shoe back on and our friend continued to stare, a little more desperately than before, eyes a little wider, mouth a bit more agape.

We played this dumb, mean game with him often. It didn’t matter if the feet belonged to a boy or a girl; our guy was equally obsessed. One day I got bold and moved a bare foot toward him, toes a-wriggle, reaching across the bus aisle until it was almost in touching distance. Finally he moved! He reached out like a zombie in a horror film reaching for a human brain when I snatched my foot away, calling him a perv and yelling at him to keep his damn hands to himself. Everyone laughed of course. We never saw where he got off the bus, and eventually we didn’t see him anymore.

Was it cruel? Yes. And also, this was a grown man who we felt would surely molest any of us minors if given the chance. But still, he was obviously quite developmentally stunted, and we should have left him alone.

Eighth Stop – Airport Avenue

When I was about thirteen, I flew north from Los Angeles – where I lived with my mom and stepdad – to visit my real dad in Sacramento. I had been making this trip solo since I was about nine years old. On one occasion, though, my mom and stepdad also flew up to Sacramento with me. They dropped me at my dad’s house (my dad did not come out to greet his ex-wife and her new husband) and then went on to visit other of our relatives for the weekend. We all had ties to Sacramento.

At the end of the weekend, I was supposed to meet my mom and stepdad on the airplane. My mom and real dad didn’t communicate much with each other, but they had arranged for me to be on the same flight as she and my stepdad were taking back to L.A. Remember, this was a time before cell phones. People just depended on others being at the place they were supposed to be, even kids, and those charged with the care of kids.

My dad dropped me off early at the gate – this is back when non-passengers could come into the airport and right up to the gates – and reminded me that my mom and stepdad would be there soon. Then he took off. Again, I had flown alone dozens – maybe over a hundred – times between the Sacramento and Burbank airports starting at nine years old. It was no big deal, so don’t hate on my poor, dear, late father for leaving me at the gate.

Well, the flight boarded and I never saw my mom or stepdad. I got on the plane and sat down. I watched the later boarders come on, but I never saw my parents. Eventually the plane finished boarding. I knew exactly what was happening: my mom and stepdad has missed the flight. They were perpetually struggling to get places on time, and I was already hoping they would miss the plane so I could go back home and have a blessed night alone at our house in North Hollywood. I had never been entrusted – for good reason – to spend a night by myself at that time; I was eager to try it out. I tucked into my book – Stephen King’s The Dead Zone – feeling quite satisfied.

My reverie was interrupted by a stewardess’s (to use the parlance of the time, with respect to flight attendants everywhere) announcement over the intercom. “Will Chip Powell please ring his call button? Again, will Chip Powell please ring his call button?” Aw fuck, what is this bullshit? As a shy kid, I did not want this kind of attention. I sheepishly reached up and pressed the button. The stewardess came over and said “Your parents called, and they requested that you get off the airplane. They say they’ll meet you in the airport in about 30 minutes.” I saw it all in an instant. They knew they were going to miss the flight, and they pulled over on the highway somewhere to use a pay phone. I told the stewardess, “No thank you,” and went back to The Dead Zone. My mom relayed to me later that the stewardess informed the gate agent to tell the party on the phone that the young man refused to leave the aircraft. “Refused to leave the aircraft!” she would howl to those to whom she retold this tale in later years, laughing hysterically. And that was that, we were soon up in the air.

After landing in Burbank, I realized I had no way to get home. I didn’t have enough money for a taxi, and I didn’t have any friends who drove yet. But I was an expert RTD rider, so somehow I figured out I could take the bus up San Fernando Blvd. and it would in a roundabout way get me to Laurel Canyon. From there I could easily jump on another bus to get home.

So there I was, a 13-year-old with shoulder-length hair, an Iron Maiden T-shirt, slip-on Vans and a suitcase standing on San Fernando Blvd. at 10:00 at night, excited about the adventures that awaited me. A man and his young son in a tan Lincoln pulled over and asked me if I knew how to get to Laurel Canyon Boulevard. I replied 1. Yes, and 2. Can you take me there? He turned out not to be a creep and drove me all the way home.

I had a blessed evening at the house in North Hollywood by myself. I heated up a bologna and English muffin sandwich in the microwave, stole some of my parents booze, and slept in and missed school the next day. When they returned the next evening they were angry that I hadn’t gotten off the plane and that I had missed school, but I didn’t care. This was their fuck up, not mine. I had my own fuck ups to make without them.

The man who picked me up at the bus stop was a good one; I got lucky as a teen. Many, many men – yes, always men – asked me to get into their car with them under some pretense. Sometimes I too asked strangers for a ride. Nothing bad ever happened to me because of this. Of course I didn’t always accept an offered ride, and I didn’t always ask. Some were creeps for sure, as in this next tale.

Ninth Stop – Knight Rider Road

At fourteen on a summer afternoon I was waiting for the bus at Oxnard and Laurel Canyon by the car wash – across the street from where I would meet Reggie a few months later – when a man came and sat next to me at the bus stop. Not too close, the right distance. He was eating a bag of chips and he started shooting the breeze with me. Eventually we saw KITT, the action-loving Knight Rider car, roll past towed by a truck festooned with cameras. That kind of thing happened in L.A. a lot, and it was always a treat. (I once saw a trailer hauling FIVE General Lees, the famed ’69 Charger from The Dukes of Hazzard.)

The man and I commented about KITT driving by, then he nonchalantly asked where I was headed and I told him to a friend’s house. He said, “Oh, I’m going that way if you need a lift. My car is just getting done being washed right here.” I said, no, that’s OK. He seemed fine with that. We chit-chatted a bit longer, he finished his chips, threw the bag in a nearby trash can, and said again, “Are you sure you don’t need a ride? I’m going right down Oxnard.” No, thanks anyway, I replied. “OK, see you around,” and he got into a white Chrysler and drove off the exact opposite direction of where he said he was going. Where I was going. He was trying to play it real cool, but I got creep vibes. KITT wasn’t the only one who dodged a bullet that day.

Tenth Stop – Lost Shoe River

This last adventure started at a bus stop near Grant High School in Van Nuys, California. I had been expelled from my home high school, North Hollywood High, for smoking weed across the street from campus, and the new school had a whole new routine, new people, and new bus routes, not really being walking distance from my home, as North Hollywood High was.

A bus stop near my new high school sat alongside the L.A. River. For those not from the area, the L.A. River is not so much a river as it is a concrete water runoff channel that snakes through the region. Sometimes it’s free flowing with lots of water in it – at least in my younger years – and sometimes it’s bone dry. When it’s mostly dry, you can find ways down into it and have loads of adventures. The L.A. River’s biggest claim to fame is likely as the site of the car race in the movie Grease, but that part of the river was very wide with banked sides. The chase scene in Terminator 2 was more like the L.A. River that we knew. In the San Fernando Valley where I grew up, the river channel had completely sheer concrete walls and two cars might have had trouble passing each other on the flat part at the bottom. At least that how it seemed in memory. Drainage outputs could be found in some neighborhoods where the homies and I lived, and you could crouch and crawl through these into the river proper. It was a private place to smoke weed, drink beer, and be teenagers. And we never saw a car race or chase down there.

A bunch of us one day were bored at the bus stop near my new high school, and I was practicing karate kicks, as one does. Suddenly my slip-on Vans shoe slipped off at the apex of my kick and flew over a chain link fence and into the mostly dry L.A. River. Oh shit! I needed that shoe, but the drop into the river was about ten feet. I knew I could retrieve my shoe by hopping the fence and hang-dropping into the river bottom, falling only about three or four feet by the time I let go. But I didn’t know how I’d get back. I scanned the river from the top, but didn’t see any drainage outlets that would have brought me back up into the neighborhood. A pine tree nearby had a long, low hanging branch though. The other students at the bus stop were now invested in my dilemma. We broke the branch off of the tree.

It was quite a show for those dozen or so kids at the bus stop. What was that idiot stoner karate guy going to do? Go home without a shoe, or go into the L.A. River? Well, the idiot told his friend Danny that he was going to hang-drop down into the river, grab the shoe, then if the kids all held the pine branch, he could shimmy back up to the top. Hopefully this could all be accomplished before the bus arrived. Danny suggested I climb down the branch while he and the other kids held it, rather than hang-drop, which seemed dicey to them. I agreed, and it was no problem climbing down the branch and dropping just a couple of feet to the river bottom. I spied my shoe in about an inch of water near the middle of the channel, but then came a terrifying sound.

No, not the sound of rushing water being released by a dam somewhere to drown me: something I and my pals maybe should have been more worried about during our years hanging out in the L.A. River. This horror was the sound of the bus arriving, and all the kids abandoning me and climbing on. All except Danny.

Danny tried in vain to hold the pine branch alone for me to climb up, but he wasn’t strong enough on the top end, and I wasn’t strong enough on the bottom end for this plan to work. It might have been accomplished with twelve kids holding it, but not with one. And climbing up a vertical wall with wet shoes and no footholds by way of only a pine branch is much harder than it looks, I learned from this experience. Danny tried to pin the branch through the fence and under the fence, but the grip wasn’t enough. If he ever got a good grip on it, it was too high for me to reach. I was trapped.

All I could do was start walking south, in the direction that I ultimately wanted to go. I knew that after a several miles I should find a drainage outlet near my own neighborhood, but I was really hoping to find one before that. I walked, and walked, and walked, and God bless Danny, he walked alongside me from the top side of the channel. He would look around up there like a surveyor of old, wondering if around this turn or that corner there would be an outlet. There wasn’t.

We kept walking. I was thirsty, and hot, and tired. At one point Danny was gone for about ten minutes, but then unexpectedly appeared on the other side of the river. “Hey, I think you can get out about a block up!” Sure enough, I came to one of the drainage tunnels of the type I knew so well. I didn’t know this particular outlet, but I knew how they worked: eventually they led to top-side civilization. This one, however, led literally to a gutter. Think of Pennywise the clown from the book and movie IT. Think of a little paper boat sailed down a gutter by an innocent kid, only to fall down to its watery grave by way of a cutout in the squared curb. Yeah, that’s where I ended up.

Rather than holding red balloons and trying to scare kids, I peered out of the gutter toward an intersection in Van Nuys that I didn’t recognize. Danny was up top talking to me, but trying not to draw attention. The gutter was wide enough for me to shimmy up through, but I spied a group of firefighters and their truck kitty-corner to where we were. Danny and I and our other friends had learned to distrust anyone in any kind of uniform, and we did not want firefighters or anyone else to see a 16-year-old stoner climbing out of a gutter. But I got tired of waiting, and when it seemed like none of the firefighters were looking our way, and with Danny saying the coast was otherwise clear, I jumped up through the opening and emerged top-side onto an unfamiliar street. Filthy, tired, and thirsty I emerged into the civilized world and Danny and I started immediately in on the “casual walk” in the opposite direction of where you want to draw attention that all guilty people eventually learn. We found another bus stop and made it home, where we celebrated with weed, beer, and a great story for our friends.

Last Stop – End of the Line

Well, the time has come to get off this bus. I rarely take it anymore. I live in a part of town where I can walk everywhere, and where I don’t walk I either drive, ride a bike, or call a Lyft. Last year I was in London with my best buddy Randy, and we took a LOT of buses! Nothing much in the way of hijinx, however, being two grown-ass men just trying to get around that huge city. It’s still fun though, especially those double-deckers if you get the front seats up top. (“Found my way upstairs and had a smoke, and somebody spoke and I went into a dream…’)

But once in a blue moon I find myself on a city bus, and I think about Dragun, or the foot fetish guy, or Reggie, Danny, and poor little Adam. I think about throwing a lit cigarette into a passing car. God, what a little shit I was. Did I deserve to grow up to be a decent citizen, a taxpayer, a person who hates litter and tries like hell to be nice to everyone he meets? Nah, I didn’t deserve it. But I’ll enjoy my life today anyway.

See you on the RTD sometime! But please keep your shoes on and the windows closed.