The Smell of Adventure Sometimes Smells Like Poop

It was a weird Thursday.

First of all, it was way too long. Woke up at 6AM and once I got to work, was asked to put in 4 additional hours. The afternoon rush was unbelievable. And then to top it all off, two ambulances full of paramedics arrived at our Starbucks to check out a homeless man who had made a comment about his diabetes and then wouldn't leave.

I left work, my second to last shift ever at the Bux, feeling like a zombie. Or like I had just survived an explosion. Stunned. Tired. Unresponsive.

I got on my crowded bus and we took off down the freeway. I heard a woman's voice come from the very rear of the bus, "Hey! HEY! I said HEY!" It got louder and louder. The woman was making her way to the front of the bus (where I was standing) shouting the whole time.

"F***ING BUS DRIVER! Doesn't stop! Ohh NO! Couldn't bear to actually DO YOUR JOB huh, bus driver? How about you try flying PLANES and then you'll see what a hard job is? YOU MISSED MY STOP and now I'm going in the F***ING wrong direction! But nooooo you don't care-" It was an incessant, angry stream of verbal assault. She was a woman on a mission, a mission to get to the front of the bus and yell at the driver.

People can be such sheep. I mean, here's someone whose mental instability is clear for anyone to see, she's irate and she's headed for the bus driver WHILE WE'RE FLYING DOWN THE FREEWAY. But no one stopped her. She asked to get by us, and without exception, every single person, including me, let her pass. Anything to avoid confrontation, right? Or maybe to avoid the smell. As soon as she came near, the odor was almost unbearable. This was more than a dirty-hasn't-showered smell. She was pooping in her pants, literally.

And then it got crazy.

She walked right over the yellow barrier line on the floor and leaned over the steering wheel, right in the female bus driver's face.

"YOU MISSED MY F***ING STOP YOU B*TCH."

The bus driver was clearly freaked out by her proximity and responded by yelling right back at her, "Get back! Get back now!"

That had little effect on the homeless woman, and it became a crazy shouting match at the front on the bus on I-5. As soon as we got to our first stop, more than half of the passengers got off, a mass exodus prompted by the situation and the driver's call to the police. But besides leaving, no one up to that point had done or said anything to acknowledge that what happened had even happened. The stillness from the passengers frustrated me. And the yelling was STILL going on as we parked indefinitely by the side of the road.

In a flash of brilliance or, more likely, stupidity, I took a step towards the angry woman and I said, "I like your sweater!"

She turned on me. "WHAT?" In that moment I fully expected her to scream at me or...I don't know, throw some poop at my face.

"I like your sweater...?" I ventured. "Where did you get it?"

"Germany," she said and then she smiled. As I had hoped, she was in fact, easily distracted from her rage.

"Germany?!" I beamed right back at her. "I lived in Germany! Why were you there?"

"Honey, what do you think? I was in the Air Force."

I got her to sit down and we talked about her career, about pilot school, about places she had visited in Europe, which led to her sharing with everyone her very strong opinions about the French...and we somehow landed on our mutual love of waffles. She told me she was mad about missing her stop because she was sick, had diarrhea and she just wanted to go home and shower.

I didn't really know what I was doing, but I kept talking to her because I figured as long as she was talking to me, she wouldn't be yelling at the bus driver. Maybe she needed to be stalled until the police arrived? It was like the most intense improv game I've ever played, because anytime I couldn't think of another question quickly enough, she would instantly remember how MAD SHE WAS and she'd go right back to screaming, "YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO STOP AT OUR STOPS, ****ING BUS DRIVER. You couldn't fly PLANES, no F***ING WAY!"

"Karen!" I shouted once to interrupt her. (I had learned her name too.) "Karen..uh, you never told me what your Grandma was doing in WW2. Was she flying planes too?"

"No, honey," she resumed our conversation casually, "Look, let me tell you something. My Grandma worked at the Boeing plant making plane parts, whaddya think?"

So for about 20 minutes it was just me and Karen at the front of the bus, me asking loud, bubbly questions, babbling about waffles and her telling me about the best brands of granola. I'm pretty sure it looked like there was more than one crazy person on that bus.

And then finally a metro official boarded the bus to see if our driver was OK. He took one look at Karen and shouted, "The police are coming! They are going to arrest you!"
Which was very helpful in calming her down (not). What he did do, though, was very forcefully ask, "Why don't you just get off the bus?"

Which worked! She just left the bus. Crisis over. And I thought, "OK DUH SHANNON. Why didn't you just get her off the bus? Your genius idea was to stall the crazy lady??"

I was feeling pretty silly about my role in the whole thing when the bus driver turned around in her seat, looked at me and said, "You are my new best friend."

Which needless to say, made me feel like a friggin' super hero.

The driver decided she had to change busses because Karen had left a, uh... sticky situation on the chair. She announced it delicately, "Hey everyone? You should probably just go find another bus because we're going to be here awhile. There's some feces on the bus and, well, I can't drive like that."

Someone yelled back "WE CAN'T HEAR YOU!" So I jumped up, looked at all of these stupid sheep-people who had just sat there the entire time, convinced that despite everything they saw occur, that the bus would eventually take them home, and I took a deep breath and projected on behalf of the driver, "THAT WOMAN POOPED ON THE BUS. YOU NEED TO GET OFF."

It was a marvelous thing to shout at strangers.