by Cat Jones

Thank God for the Cleveland bus or Ida shot myself. 

It was back when I was living in Ohio for a year, trying to put my life back together after the 4th horseman of the apocalypse came riding into my world back in 2012 and blew everything to shit, right in line with the Mayan calendar. But that’s another story for another time. In that post-apocalyptic Ohio year, I used to take the bus to the Cleveland art museum (I swear it rivals the Met), and to the Arcade (a beautiful, old, rococco- looking but mostly abandoned, 19th century underground-ish mall thing that was pretty cool in a depressing kinda way), and to the funky, eclectic, West Side market, fulla little booths that had been in vendor’s families for generations. (Imagine Saturday Market, Portland friends, only way more ethnic, and with foods instead of crafts. Every kind of strange, baffling, delightful or horrifying delicacy you can imagine. Weird vegetables, the sad, dead faces of animals surprised to be there, pastries whose names I mostly couldn’t pronounce. It was a snowy walk thru downtown Cleveland and all the crunching way across the windy, frozen, once-burning river to get to it from the bus stop, but it was worth it.)

I made sucha day of these wanderings! It’s where I developed a taste for green tea matcha, cuz I’d get off the bus freezing right near a stand where I could get this magical, green, elixir, and then I’d go wandering. So there is something to be said for poverty; that you see parts of the local landscape you otherwise might not, that you really appreciate the smallest things, that a warm, paper cup full of frothy, green, tea, clutched in chilly, gloved, hands on a snowy street in Cleveland can mean almost everything.

But then also? It sucks. 

I almost froze to death on a Cleveland street once, waiting for the last bus home that night, and no I’m not exaggerating, and no, I don’t think anyone would even have noticed, other than my dog, for a very long time.  But to back up… So the ritual was that maybe once or twice a month, when I could afford the $5- each way ticket, I’d ride that bus into the heart of Cleveland and make an entire day of it. I mean, what else did I have to do then? The art museum, the architecture (so much Gotham- city art deco! Such an under- appreciated northern fortress of a city!), the green tea matcha. Then, as evening drew on, I’d make my pedestrian way back to the heart of the city, where I’d catch the bus back to the complicated little room in Akron where I was staying that year.

The bus stop in downtown Cleveland was on a deserted corner near this enormous, schmaltzy, hotel that was more like a palace than a place to stay. And I’d stop in there, pretending to be a wealthy tourist or something, to warm up awhile before catching the bus back to Akron. Well, and I’ll be honest, on the way to this palace, I’d always stop here and there for a cheap pint or 2… it was part of the adventure. So then I’d get to this Grand Palace, and go inside, and I’d use their opulent, black and gold- flecked marble bathrooms, and then I’d wander up to the bar on the mezzanine and order a pint or – if I was flush that day – a cocktail because sucha place seems to want a fancy cocktail, and then I’d sit in an opulent, 18th century booth wrapped in 20 foot tall, red velvet drapery, at a huge, crystalline window overlooking the comings and goings of the bus stop. 

Sucha bus runs every 15 or 20 minutes in the morning, getting people to work, and then not at all all day, and then again every 15 or 20 minutes getting everyone home to bed. And then it parks for the night. No more buses out. So I’d clutch that bus schedule with me all day, and I’d always make my way back to that hotel early enough to have a drink without pressing. Then, when I was ready, I’d make my way outta the velvet booth, down the lushly carpeted stairs, out the wide doors, past doormen dressed like Russian palace guards with golden epaulettes, and into the FREEZING ASSED, cigarette-butted, snow crunching cold of the Cleveland night. I’d walk that FROZEN and HURRICANE- FORCE WINDED block over to the mostly-deserted bus stop (I liked to get there with plenty of time, and nobody else ever waits outside in Cleveland). 

Well so on that one occasion, yeh I’d had a few pints at this cozy little beer pub on the outskirts, and then a pint at this friendly little dive bar near the art museum, and then a pint and a quesadilla at a cheap neighborhood restaurant along the way, and then a pint or two in the Arcade just to get outta the cold, and THEN the marble and the velvet cocoon and the cocktail. So I was a little looped. And when it came time for the bus, Hell, Ida stayed in that booth all night and fuck the trek home, but my dog, Romeo was at home and needed a walk and dinner. And no, my hausmates back in Akron weren’t gonna be responsible for taking care of THAT. Le sigh. So I padded down those stairs and out to catch the penultimate bus home. (Well no, I think there were 3 left. So whatever that is. And why is there a word for 2nd to last anyway? And why is it sucha long and pompous word for such a non thing.) 

So yeh, I wandered the block over to the other world, where one catches buses. And yeh, it mighta been visible from the mezzanine window at the hotel, but it was a whole other world, and other than me, there was no mixing between these worlds. It felt like a million miles, so cold and arduous and deserted was the walk. And nobody inside the hotel ever gave a glance, much less a thought, to what was going on at sucha plebian place as a ‘bus stop’ – Wtf is that, anyway – or cared about the comings and goings of the dark, coated figures wandering around in the dirty snow. 

So I get over there, to that lonely, arctic, outpost. And you’d think there’d be a shelter, or at the very least a bench, for such an important stop. But no. That might encourage homeless people not to freeze to death or something. So nope, just a deserted street corner in the cold. You wouldn’t even know anyone used it, other than the mad dash of anonymous humanity in worker’s uniforms pouring outta alleys and doorways once every 15 minutes or so in the evenings. 

So there I was. And I think I have suggested that I mighta been a little looped. So I’m standing there, in this enormous, black, coat that I’d found in a thrift store back in Portland, and I’m waiting the 10 minutes to the next bus. The THIRD to the last one for the night. (Pencilultimate?) 

They say it was colder than Mars that winter, and by God I believe it. And, despite – or, physiology being what it is, probably *because* of – the bitter, biting, sub- arctic, Martian cold and the icy wind blowing gritty snow drifts against my ankles, I got reeeeally sleeeeeeeepy. 

I don’t know if I’ve ever been that sleeeeeeeepy. Cept maybe once when I was about 11, waiting for the novocane to kick in while leaned back in a chair near a sunny window at the dentist’s office, where I did NOT want to be caught sleeping. I was struggling now, on this snowy street corner, as hard as I’d struggled in that dentist’s chair, with much higher stakes, and with all the same futility. I just couldn’t begin to stay awake. I couldn’t keep my eyes open. 

As I said, there was *nowhere* to sit down outta the cold. But I couldn’t stay awake a moment longer. Fuck it. I sat down on the snowy sidewalk, leaning against a frozen, metal, post sticking up outta the snow. I wrapped myself up in that great, big, coat and fell asleep, right there on that little-match-  girl sidewalk. 

Thunderously asleep. 

The sleep of the dead. 

Apparently, I’d slept right through the tumult of the (pencil- ultimate) bus finally coming, with its associated pack of last minute passengers shuffling outta hidden doorways in their janitor uniforms and cleaning- lady attire, raucously materializing, stomping out last minute cigarette butts into the grey snow, and then disappearing into the folding doors, whisked away in a greenhouse- gas fog to wherever the peepuls go at night. 

And I slept through the bus after that one, too. The actual penultimate one. And Ida gone right on sleeping thru the night until I froze to death, too, cept for this one black lady in a blue uniform, disgorged from some meaningless day job somewhere at the back of a hotel for the purpose of saving my life. I don’t know who she was, other than a fellow bus rider with a more saintly sense of duty than anyone else in Cleveland had that night. I woke up to her gently kicking the bottom of my boot, repeatedly asking, “Did you want the bus? HEY. Were you waiting for this bus?” 

I got the feeling she’d already been on the bus, and paid her faire, and only stepped back out at the last moment when it became clear no one else was gonna address the poor drunk passed out in the snow outside on the sidewalk.  (This impression was buttressed by the fact that, when I did finally climb groggily onto the bus behind her, I noticed she didn’t poke anything into the faire machine and just walked straight to her seat.) I blinked my eyes, and it was very dark now. The snow had piled up in my soaked lap. And there it was, the very last bus of the night, already full of all the exhausted people who must have climbed right over me to get inside, all settled in and staring out at me, and the irritated driver, glaring over the top of the big, half- circle steering wheel at me, and this lady going, “This the last bus, honey, u wanting a bus?” 

It was a reasonable guess, given that I was leaning on the very post for the BUS STOP sign, but it was a leap no other passenger and certainly not any driver in 3 full buses had been willing to make. 

Wtf is wrong with people, man? 

But thank God for that woman. And I hafta tell u that, as I got stiffly to my frozen feet, shuffled sheepishly onto the bus under the relentless and silent gaze of passengers and driver, as my frozen fingers forked the $5 to get home into the metal and plastic machine, as I shuffled up the dim, wet, rubbery, aisle, as I folded up into the very last free seat somewhere near the back, as the engine ground itself up, as anonymity returned to everyone and we were carried into the silent night… I thought (not for the first time, back then), that I had probably crossed yet another milestone in what had been, at the time, a steady downward spiral. 

I’d come within inches of freezing to death on the sidewalk, at a goddamn bus stop. 

Drunk.

… in CLEVELAND. 

Whatta cliché. 

I feel like there’s a thing about passing out in the dirty, grey, frozen snow at a bus stop (… in Cleveland…) that, well I don’t know how to characterize this… that is a thing that “normal” people don’t do. They don’t even imagine it, or ever think about the kind of people who do things like this. And I know, everybody wants to believe they’re not among the so- called “normies,” and isn’t it fun to look down on *them.* But this is not what those people mean.

They mean they think they’re interesting, quirky, unique, “different” than the straw- man “norm.” They don’t mean, passing -out -drunk -ina -over- sized – salvation- army -coat in -dirty -snow -fulla -used gum -and -cigarette -butts -atta -Cleveland -bus -stop -ina -middle of a -winter -night – while -just – tryna -get -home to -feed -a -pit -bull -and -let -him -out -because -u and -that -dog -are -all -either -of -u -has -left -ina -world kinda not normal. There isn’t a lot that’s very flattering about that kinda “not normal.” 

That’s even more “not normal” than I felt, years and years before, in a tiny kitchen in NW Portland, scrubbing out a stolen shot glass with 409 because I’d found a bloody needle sticking outta it after all the punks in Portland wound up comiserating at my place the night after my friend Eric was shot to death on the corner of 17th and Davis, on his way home from a club I’d dragged him to. “Donna Reed never had to do this,” I remember muttering under my breath back then. (I had been working on a content analysis of the presentation of women in old t.v. shows around that time. They were all dead mothers you never saw, magical women, or really good housekeepers in aprons and pearls. And Donna Reed was the queen of them all.) But then, fuck Donna Reed. Who woulda ever wanted to live like THAT, anyway. I mighta preferred freezing at a Martian-Cleveland bus stop to that, had anyone asked me then. Possibly, even if anyone asked me now. 

 I never could bring myself to drink outta that glass again. 

I guess THAT’S another story for another time, too.

It’s that same, jolting sense of disconnect, though, between who we think we’re supposed to be, and who we actually are. How we’ve been instructed to present ourselves to the world, and how reality intrudes. But this. This was different.

This didn’t have that same sense of martyred camaraderie about it, the way my thrashed, post-Eric kitchen did. That mighta been a very dark time, oh it was. But punk mourning rituals are poignant and colorful and wild, and have their own, alternative, sense about them. This had no sense. It wasn’t poetic at the time at all. It was pathetic. It was… it was the most ordinary way in the world to be “not normal.” An anonymous hump, wrapped in black, thrift-store wool, wadded beneath the mounting snow, obliviously freezing to death… seen but not seen at all by bus, after bus, after bus fulla service workers on their way home at night, beneath the mezzanine.    

It was only a single evening in a long and tumultuous wander through the underworld. Just a single moment, really. But I feel weirdly like a lot of the 6 years between this moment and that one, back in that frozen, Martian, winter, has been a journey towards becoming something other than a nameless, frozen, body beneath a salvation army coat on a snowy Cleveland Street corner, with nowhere to go but onward.