Take My Seat: Please!

By Nick O'Connor

Patiently collected over five years of weekday commuting, this episodic diary takes place entirely on, in and near public transit in Portland, Oregon. Fifty absolutely-true tales are recounted by a travel-worn businessman. All are set in the limbo that occurs on the trains and busses within the two cities between which he commutes. There are stories of the unexpected; petty violence, eccentric strangers, impromptu concerts and startling acts of kindness. But there are also stories of the unapologetically expected and, even when our narrator speaks to age-old inner city archetypes, he delivers a striking depiction of their humanity and paints vivid pictures of humans whom he will only ever meet once. Sometimes cynical and droll, sometimes wondrous but always charming, this nonfiction collection is an honest and simplistically beautiful account of ourselves rubbing shoulders.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nick O'Connor
• Release date: Jun 16, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463324707

Book preview

YOU CAN HAVE MY SEAT

by

Nick O'Connor

Copyright 2018 Nick O'Connor

Published by Nick O'Connor at Smashwords

Smashwords Edition License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your enjoyment only, then please return to Smashwords.com or your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Copyright 2017 by Nick O'Connor. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, inclding photocopying, recording,or by an information storage and retrieval system except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a magazine, newspaper or on the Web without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, please contact Nick O'Connor at [e-mail].

For Shannon, without whose kind urging this book would not be.

And for Maeve. who is forging the novel of the future.

CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgements

Acting Like A Human Being

A Heart Of Pharmaceutical Grade Purity

A Music Lover's Lament

Anything Can Happen Day

Behind The Mask

Blazing On The Crazy 8

Bus Bangers

Busted

Coffee Power

Coolest Driver Ever

Cracker Jungle

Domestic Quarrel

Eternal Questions

Grrrrr

He Lived

Hollywood Style

In The Noir

I Remember Shirley Temple

It May Be A Little Late To Point This Out

Last Laughs

Missed Connection?

Money For Nothing

My Interloper

On The Edges Of Our Seats

Passing The Day Away

Poor In Spirit

Protecting And Serving

Quiet Guys

Rez On Wheels

Riding With The Enemy

Roll Titles

Sacred Citizen

Safety And Comfort.

Sanity Is Irrelative

Scam Artist Rips Off Innocent Citizen

Social Skills

Some People

Survivors

Talking Tango

Texting While Holding Hands

The All-American Game

The Cast Iron Homing Pigeon

CONTENTS (continued)

The Cost Of Free Speech

The Girl And The Honored Citizen

The Sweet Life

The Virtuous Fare Inspector

The Whine And The Crash

The White Dress

This Will Never Happen Again

We All Lived

What Is He Doing?

Work Release

PREFACE

In 2010, after a long, dismal unemployment, I got a job. The commute was long. Each morning trip started near the landmark Spare Room bar on 42nd Avenue in Northeast Portland, with a 10-minute bus ride to the Hollywood Transit Center. From there I transferred to a Max train towards downtown. An hour after leaving home, I stepped onto the Sunset Transit Center platform at the edge of Beaverton and walked a few minutes to the office.

In the evening, no surprise, same thing in the other direction.

The trips ended in 2015 when the company closed its local office. By then I had made the round trip something like 1,300 times. That's a lot of hours of ride sharing with total strangers, and a lot of not much going on but mass endurance. The aggregate reading, daydreaming, phone fiddling and podcast listening done by riders just to get through the daily enforced anonymous blankness proves that zombies are usually well-behaved.

But.

Given all that time spent and the swath of humanity that passed by, inevitably someone broke through the blur. Again and again, live drama, and comedy, occurred in front of me (and, of course, in full view of a whole crowd of riders). I took notes. I wrote up the most vivid incidents and posted them on a blog, Sardines Are Only Packed Once.

This book collects most of those blog posts. Each one reports a single moment. They are all unrelated to one another except that all of them happened on a TriMet vehicle, at a busstop or transit platform, or between rides.

The incidents are obviously also connected because I was there, with busfare, the eye of a voyeur and the ear of an eavesdropper.

May you enjoy the commute.

Nick O'Connor

Portland, Oregon

May 2018

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The strangers depicted in these verbal snapshots are all real. Not one of them has granted me permission to write about them. It would be insincere of me to pretend to thank them, as they were just going about their lives and had no idea that a curious writer was taking notes and deciding whether or not their behavior was cool or interesting enough to include in his book.

But how can I not feel grateful? The active ingredients here are the endlessly unpredictable and emotionally compelling behavior of other people. So I'll just thank TriMet for the great show and the low admission price.

Thanks also to my friends Ridge Tolbert, who enthusiastically reposted many of these on Facebook, Chris Nielsen, who tweeted them, and good old David B. Fisher, for the Likes and Comments.

Thanks to Joel Friedlander, The Book Designer. He has given away a ton of free information that helped me think about the details of bookmaking. And along the same lines, I'm grateful to Smashwords' Mark Coker, whose presentation at the Portland Public Library threw open the door to publishing this myself.

Acting Like A Human Being

I took a different bus last Tuesday and had an evening I never had before. It started around 6:00 p.m. I was headed for a meeting at a place directly under the OHSU Tram in an area called Lair Hill.

Trimet's Trip Planner had recommended picking up the 9 Powell downtown and getting off at the Ross Island Bridge. But a 17 Holgate showed up first. I had an idea it stopped at the bridge, and the driver confirmed my suspicion.

I sat in front, on the bench. At the next stop, a man sat next to me and, in whipping out earbuds, whacked me on the nose with one. The force was something less than a nerf bullet. I think it was a first for both of us.

He looked concerned and said, Oh, I'm sorry. Are you okay?

I think I'll make it. No harm, no foul.

You're one of those nice Portland people.

We discussed the very niceness of Portland people and agreed that being nice didn't mean becoming friends. And we didn't. But the encounter set me up for the rest of the evening.

Around 9:30 p.m., after my meeting, I made it back to the Ross Island Bridge stop. A woman was waiting there. She volunteered that the bus was due in 10 minutes. She watched my hand go into a paper bag, where I had a bagel sandwich. As I unwrapped it I saw her staring.

Hungry?

Starving. I'm homeless.

Take half. I held the sandwich out. She grabbed the whole thing. As it came apart into halves she took one, saying, Oh, sorry, I thought you wanted me to break it in half, and giggled.

We started eating, which made the bus come immediately. I was able to shove my half sandwich into the bag, but my new friend – if that's what she was – had no bag.

She said, I'm just gonna eat it.

The bus was fairly crowded and I had to stand. But she found a seat on the front bench and ate.

After each bite she muttered how delicious the sandwich was. She asked me where I got it and all I could tell her was some place on Corbett.

A crowd of ten or so young adults boarded together. My new acquaintance - not friend -- said hello to one of them and they bantered. Another woman, already seated, eagerly greeted one of the new male riders.

Suddenly everyone was talking to everyone. Turned out a lot of them had been at an evening meeting that had to do with recovery. I heard conversation about sober houses, roommates, jobs. The volume level increased by the block, but I had to leave before the party reached the next level.

I caught the 75 at Powell and Cesar Chavez. In a text exchange with my wife I planned to pick up a few things at Whole Foods, which was going to close at 10:00. At 9:52, the bus stopped at the Hollywood Transit Center. Whole Foods is two stops past the transit center, about a three or four minute walk.

A man boarded, He was skeletal, with sickly yellow skin and buggy eyes. He was dragging a large garbage bag filled with clanking cans.

The man and the driver talked. As they talked, the driver took out a small pad and took notes. I thought of walking to Whole Foods, but figured even a longish conversation would get me to the store a couple minutes before closing.

After a minute, the driver switched to a clipboard so he could write more extensive notes. Then the driver handed the man some of the notes. The man made some notes on the notes while they continued to talk. If I had known the lovely couple were on an actual date, I definitely would have walked.

At 9:56, the man clanked to a seat. There was still time to get to the store, if the driver would now go.

A