Every city has its own rhythm.
Its own heartbeat.
Its unique flavoring that sets it apart from all other cities.
But all towns have certain things in common, a downtown, a warehouse/industrial area, the commercial strips, the residential districts, the ‘hoods, the red light districts, which usually are reserved for heavy dope dealing and prostitution of all varieties, tastes and kinks after all of the businesses are closed for the day in the warehouse zones.
For the most part, when someone drives, the intentions of where they hope to go are concealed because they could be going anywhere as far as you are concerned and know one is any the wiser. But when your option of moving about the earth is limited to the public transportation system, your movements are literally just as transparent to a person like me who is in the position of driving the very bus that you are forced into taking everyday.
It’s funny, although I sit there in the driver’s seat of that bus every single day, aside from an occasional greeting, most treat me like I am the invisible man. They have no clue that I might know more about their private lives than they could ever imagine!
Repetition is the greatest teacher. Never have I come out one day to work with the intention of finding out anything about someones personal life, but in actuality I could tell you what many of my regular passengers are going to wear everyday of the week and which wigs my female riders will slap on their heads as though I won’t notice!
I have this one somewhat overweight hot and bothered middle age women who walks slightly bent over with a limp and wears her “Beyonce” wig every payday, she WAS a very nice lady but had no business wearing that wig on her head, it wasn’t becoming on her and she just wasn’t fooling anyone. Maybe it was a last fleeting attempt to capture her youth long gone but unbeknownst to her, we all go through changes as time reeks havoc on our egos, maybe it wasn’t too bad a thing ’cause I guess it was harmless…….
Well why did I say that she “was” a nice lady? Did she pass away? Did she move away? Actually no to both questions. I do see her occasionally as she waits on the other side of the street to board the bus that will arrive after me everyday as she refuses to ride my bus if I am driving it!
What happened why she won’t ride with me anymore?
To understand this dilemma you have to go back a bit to when she first started riding with me. She works at Wal-mart. The Wal-mart that she works in is situated right in the middle of the hotel clusters where tourists flock to on their vacations not too far from International Drive on Turkey Lake Rd.
This particular Wal-mart store has quite a different “feel” to it if you have ever gone there because it is always filled with excited visitors from other states and countries. It kind of has what I would call the “airport feel”, because of the high turnover of people that are just passing through. And while I could very much understand that it is an exciting place to work, it can also be a very draining place to be obligated to go to every single day of one’s work week.
So when many of the store employees board my bus, I get a chance to overhear who the supervisors pet is, the complaints, who stole money from the cash register, the gripes, who might be smoking crack ’cause they keep calling in from work and are losing lots of weight and borrowing lots of money to the “who is messing around with who on the side behind their spouses back in the dark parking lot in their car on a smoke break” inside gossip!
So in that very intense hostile working environment, for an older woman, it can be a bit much. So our wigged down passenger to whom we will address by her real name Diane, she always looked forward to the short 15 minutes of riding with me to unwind from her day before she had to exit my bus at her transfer point to get her direct bus home.
At first, the short pleasant greetings turned into general conversation. After a time, she began to reveal personal information about her life, nothing specific that anyone could use against her, just stuff like her favorite dishes to her last visit back to her hometown in New Jersey where she was born and raised. Harmless banter. But after a time she began to confide in me some things about her home situation that no one else other than her the Creator should be privy to.
I’ve never understood this, but so many people who ride with me everyday feel so free to talk about the most intimate details of their bedroom activities in the public forum of the bus! Don’t think that because they are “acting” as though they are deep in sleep or rocking their head to an imaginary musical beat on their “now turned off” I-Pod that those who ride with you are not all down in your conversation and intently listening also.
Diane was no different at this point. It wasn’t only me, but it basically all who cared to listen! it was public knowledge that her husband had not the interest to make love to her at all (Even WITH the Beyonce wig!!) literally for the last few years! I kind of backed away from that type of conversation once she started to get into that rant because not only was I not interested, but it did not look professional at all if I were to indulge in any talk about her intimate private life.
But she was not to be stopped! She told everyone within earshot how much she worked and how much he never gave her toward the bills every month. She was also mad at how much her 18 year old son controlled her also by demanding money to pay his cellphone bill yet never completed any chores around the house.
Her life was a mess and while at first the other passengers and co-workers of hers who rode the bus with her encouraged her to tell her business for their entertainment, after a while it became annoying to them and they hated to see her coming with the same old tired depressing story.
But through it all I still showed her the basic respects and manners. It was something that she didn’t get at home. And for the first few months of her riding with me, little did I know that she was to think much more of our bus operator/passenger relationship than it really was in reality.
I first noticed her long lusty hungry gazes in the reflection of the windshield. Every bus driver knows the windshield reflection trick. It gives you the heads up and has prevented the theft of others peoples property many a night. You can see them without them noticing you. I utilize this tactic all of the time to get the upper hand when driving with suspicious and suspect characters who might be armed with a lot more than offensive breath and toxic body odor.
The amount of guns and drugs that travel covertly on the public transportation systems across the country will blow your mind. Orlando is no different. Got to stay on point.
But watching this woman’s gaze on my physical form alarmed me because it wasn’t just that normally appreciative look that a woman would give a man in passing and the way around. Ladies, you know when a man is harmlessly ogling you and when you might have problems when an outright “don’t know when to stop” nut is all up in your face!
She looked at me with a frighteningly imbalanced euphoric painted on grin that resembled a crazed stalker killer that popped Prozac, Ecstasy and methamphetamine’s all in one swallow!
As she exited my bus she gave me such a flirtatious look while at the same time being unaware that her wig (Now all of her uncombed gray hairs were showing all up and down her neckline! Lol!) was on the verge of succumbing to the ever present pull of gravity. She was definitely missing a few screws for sure!
Well the next day was a classic and prove to be the last day that she rode my bus.
Everything so far that day went very routine as usual, there were young girls who were so loud as they sat in the back of the bus sharing juicy teen gossip about the latest guy that they kissed.
Two gentleman in their late 30’s exchanged phone numbers so they could later discuss a particular job opening across town that they both found out about in the newspaper.
One older lady sat pretty much oblivious to all who surrounded her on my bus but could be heard repeatedly whispering under her breath about how good the Lord is……
Diane took her usual seat close to the front of the bus near me and much to my surprise, just as she sat down, another passenger to whom I haven’t seen in many months boarded my bus!
Her name is Eboni and she used to ride with me on one of my other regular bus routes and used to have so much fun discreetly laughing at some of the odd characters who would ride my bus……just good clean fun!
We were so happy to see each other that for that short moment in time nothing else existed. We hugged and laughed and radiated a true joy at the sight of each other, our energy was completely platonic and no one who observed our larger than life greeting would have thought otherwise.
Its a shame that some people cannot understanding that there are men and women who can love each other genuinely “just because” without smearing such an innocent connection with their twisted thoughts of something deviant going on behind the “facade” of friendship…….not all women and men are like that.
But this when Diane’s true colors emerged, her fangs were completely exposed for all to see in contrast to the other happy faces on my bus who felt our mutual joy in friends reconnecting.
She was literally ANGRY!
……And did I forget to mention that Eboni is Diane’s coworker at Wal-mart and they have both brought my name up by chance in general conversations in the past between them and it was a well known fact that I knew Eboni as a friend long before I was ever acquainted with Diane!
Well the thought of her not getting all of the attention drove her shockingly over the edge! She stood up, and screamed profanities at the top of her lungs demanding that I let her get off of the bus NOW!!!!! I never knew she had that kind of vocabulary and truly never knew that she felt that her and I were an exclusive item!
I pulled the bus over at the next stop and allow her to exit. She never stop screaming at everyone about how she always gets the bad (She didn’t use the word bad either! Lol!) end of the stick!
My eyes were definitely opened that day and I would be careful in everything that I said to anyone in the future so that it would never be misconstrued ever again! You just never know how people receive will your kindness and the state of mind that they are in when you treat them nicely. I swear, if she had a gun that evening, I might have been another statistic or story item on the evening news! Thank god she didn’t!
Now obviously embarrassed at her immature outburst, Diane now hides from me and waits for the bus that is scheduled to arrive behind me. I see her standing on the other side of the street on the bus stop at the time when she used to ride with me. This forces her to get home even later all because she can’t face the deeper issues that she possesses inside. Scary. Real scary.
Which leads me to yet another sad story of a young lady named Tawana. Tawana is 29 years old but has the mind of a 9 year old. Now from what I see, this is not the case in all areas of her life because in some ways she can be quite shrewd in a grown up kind of way. But for the record, yes, she is “special.”
She works at a local theme park here in Orlando, Universal Studios to be exact. From what I hear she lives with her mother, but Tawana is ever hardly home. You see, Tawana spends every possible hour that she is not at work hanging out downtown at the bus station looking for “attention.”
Every single day for YEARS you will see her sitting on any one of the benches with a glazed expression affixed on her face. Its a pleasant expression at first sight, but as you get to know her rhythms, you will understand why she maintains a very approachable demeanor.
She is tall, about 5’11″l in height, slender with a pretty face that she uses to her advantage. Its not the kind of drop dead gorgeous pretty, but an innocent little girl kind of look. Remember, she IS 29 years old and is well schooled in knowing how to flirt.But she is definitely a sad story waiting to happen, she finishes work around one o’clock everyday and is a fixture at the bus depot from just before two in the afternoon sporting her well worn and very wrinkled work uniform.
Any man who approaches her in THAT low down kind of manner ought to be ashamed of himself, her mind is NOT that of a grown woman but from what I have found out in her case, most guys don’t even care as they actually see an easy catch. Which is sad.
I heard once that a rumor was going around that these young guys gave her the nickname “rash-mouth” because every few weeks, she would break out with a rash around her lips like the red coloring around the lips of Ronald McDonald……….
She loves to meet the new bus drivers and ride with them to get to know them, which, if you didn’t realize that she was riding your bus to get to know YOU, then you just didn’t know until you figured it out after being obvious. After she never got off of your bus and rode with you the whole entire round trip back downtown you kind of understood that she just had nothing else left to do with her life except to go home, which she never did until the last buses pulled out from the downtown bus station…………..
One day it happened to me, after pulling my bus out from the downtown station, I find this woman/child sitting in the front seat smiling at me as though I were a life long friend. “Maybe she knows me from somewhere else” I thought to myself. But as I cautiously allow the conversation that she was determined to bring to me unfold, I realized that she was somewhat “challenged,” which at this point explained the funny way in which she spoke and actually the content. I mean, I didn’t know this chick from jack and here she is just two minutes into talking to me telling me that she is getting her vacation in September and she will spend it in Georgia. So I’m like, “why is she telling me this? I don’t know her like that” But it was all self explanatory to say the least.
Now I can see why these horny dogs out here called men have taken advantage of her because they saw how gullible she was and how she must have gotten a taste of some sex at some point, loved it, and wanted to do it with everyone that she liked. Her mind wasn’t right and she didn’t have the maturity because of her being challenged to understand better than that so I put the blame on these men out here.
I’ve heard many stories about Tawana and knew that there had to be a modicum of truth to them, but when you hear many different people who do not know each other tell the same exact story about her and what she likes to do you KNOW it’s the truth!
But what is truly tragic is that as long as she continues to indulge in unsafe and unprotected sex on a very random level, it is only a matter of time before the free ride is over. And I do know that she is doing this because she did end up pregnant for a time and aborted the child. I never knew the depth of her unaware demeanor until she sat up in the back of my bus and told everyone within earshot and no one in particular that the “baby was pulled out of my honeypot by my doctor” with absolutely no understanding of what she was saying or no shame. She said it with the hugest smile one could imagine, like a kid who came home with a perfect score of one hundred on a very hard spelling test!
The men would just walk up to her and say “come on Tawana, let’s take a little walk!” And she was overjoyed to go! They would return to the bus depot after about twenty minutes spent in a dark alley out of sight only to hear some guy almost twice her age bragging to one of his patiently waiting (To hear the details!) buddies that “those Viagra pills work like a charm!” Lord, have we sunk so low in this day and age? It can’t get any worse as the end times are truly here!
And to add insult to injury believe me when I tell you that there IS a Viagra dealer who hangs around the bus terminal for a few hours on the various paydays to supply his product to the older men who have a younger woman on the side that they pay to play with. Trust me, this guy told me his complete hustle from his connection the the local Pharmacy to how he builds up his loyal clientele who are absolutely just too embarrassed to go and get the Viagra directly themselves! He is 55 years old, works as a short order cook in a local greasy spoon restaurant and supplements his income in this manner.
I KNEW he was up to something because he would stand up downtown in the same spot and NEVER move like he was on post or something. He said if he turned a profit of about two hundred bucks or more a week, he was happy with that because he wasn’t trying to broadcast what he was doing to much. The eye opening insight that he shared with me was that although the older men were the bulk of his regular customers, a good portion of his last minute “rush” money came from the insecure younger guys just barely out of their teens and in their twenties who wanted to impress a young (Or older for that matter! LOL!) lady with his staying power that first time to leave an impression.
What has sex turned into these days? A sporting match with a time clock to measure how much longer one can last than the boyfriend before? What ever happened to tenderness, intimacy, communication and commitment?
Has it come down to just picking up a mildly retarded girl up at the bus station to have your way with her in a nearby alley or paying the local neighborhood Viagra man to be guaranteed the staying power of an iron pipe while the original purpose of woman and man being together has been all but forgotten.
So much of what we go through in this life because of negative choices stems from some issue that we are having with the opposite (If you are heterosexual) sex, real or perceived. So much could be avoided if we would just control ourselves, follow our Creators laws and maintain a healthy self image to know that we need to love ourself first instead of searching for it in all the wrong places. If “rash-mouth” Tawana and Diane the Beyonce wig wearer knew this, their lives would be so much different……………..
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