Time and Tide and Nick

The “Holidays” show up every year. If Life seems cyclical that could be – in part – because we live on a spinning ball, if you can imagine. So it’s December. Again. The year-end hullabaloo (to generalize) always gets me thinking about the throngs of people, the millions of hidden lives, the unsurfaced stories that make up the fabric of mortal existence.   

This morning our Santa Barbara MTD bus driver, Nick, is holding forth in a stream-of-blather at the top of his lungs, even as he guided his mighty ship across our seaside town. The oblong concavity of the windshield amplifies the shouting and sends it rolling in a crisp mid-range wave down the aisle of the bus. Like drivers everywhere, but most familiarly those on TV and in the movies, he’s looking straight ahead and yelling at the windshield. He seems very happy. One might say Nick is ecstatic, though that suggests religious exaltation. On the other hand, why not? It’s as if he’s talking excitedly to the air, or to His Time, and maybe that’s also an intended or unintended effect of the yammering driver/philosopher. We’re variously charmed or alarmed by these public expressions in the wider world. On the whole, we seem determined not to be swayed or moved by these public utterances, these very partial glimpses into another soul’s proffered inner world. 

Nick Is a Moving Speaker

But Nick is a moving speaker. I can feel that his happy narrative hollering is the core of the man. The simple fact of a guy happily shouting detailed, harmless, personal information into the air in a confined space? It’s upsetting to most people, the everyday people, let’s say (not the Sly Stone kind). Again, the degree of discomfort varies. As Nick shouts out his story, the bus passengers clear their throats and avert their eyes, or in plain vanilla fear zero in on their little iThings and glare intently at them. There are surely few things as unnerving to the Digital Native as a stranger divulging out loud in a confined space. Eww! As Nick’s happy shouting continues I look around to visually poll my fellow passengers on the bus. One or two of them meet my eyes with Mona Lisa grins, concurring with what they believe is my opinion – that our bus driver is a funny embarrassment and an anomaly, a pitiable entertainment. I smile back, thinking That is not my opinion, you bore.

Nick Is Loudly Alive

Nick is loudly alive and he knows it. He may be sermonizing. If so, this is his theme; ‘Hey, frightened fools! You can shout if you want, no one gets hurt. You can sing in public, feign a seizure, skip a rock on a pond, do a jig in the funeral parlor, talk loudly to birds. This is all a lucid dream, or may as well be. How many times you gotta have that shown to you?’ Every minute or so he shoots a glance at the long mirror installed by the manufacturers, a rear-view mirror whose only contained ‘rear view’ subject is Us. Per the nature of the aimed mirror, when he can see us, we can see him. He flashes his dark, laughing, beetle-browed eyes at us through the mirror. He’s checking his captives and shouts through what occasionally sounds like an approaching fit of laughter. Behind me a woman is talking into her cell phone.

“Pierre Cardin,” she says. Then more plaintively, “Pierre Cardin!”

“I went to El Monte High School, in L.A.!” Nick shouts, really seeming almost to laugh. At what? It occurs to me this liberated human may simply be bursting with the joy of unfiltered living – as Rod McKuen as that sounds. “I remember our young handsome substitute teacher, on June 6 in 1966! He told us — ” and here I think Nick is going to say something about all those sixes, lay some numerology on us. But Nick says “ — he told us we’d need to wait 11 years for this to happen again!” He laughs like a bad actor in a movie. Though the laugh is unforced and genuine, it has a certain performative edge, Nick’s ongoing testimony. I’m alive and I’m a hothouse orchid! Same as you! “You know? July 7, 1977! My school was just a few blocks from the Ambassador hotel –” here I look up from my laptop. The Ambassador —

Gratitude

“That’s where Bobby Kennedy was shot,” a withered and mostly toothless guy in the seat behind me says through his gums, and I’ve turned to nod agreement. The withered guy looks at me with a slow aiming of his head. The fanning creases at each of his mouth corners are an Egyptian delta clogged and crusted with what look like the stains of crystallized tobacco juice. His eyes widen briefly at my acknowledgement, I suppose, his eyebrows arching above the frames of his bent aviator shades. He briefly radiates something definite and magnetic, and I realize it’s gratitude.

“Sirhan Sirhan shot him!” Nick shouts, voice fraying. “That busboy helped Bobby! Remember? That busboy bent down and helped Bobby! Remember the picture?” I think of the iconic Boris Yaro photo of busboy Juan Romero in his busboy-whites – kneeling, tending to the calmly staring Robert Kennedy, the crazy mannequin sprawl of Kennedy’s body beatified in the corona of light on the wet floor. 

We’re all here and gone, a swarm of meaningful dots streaming through this blinding beam of light, this life, with our secret stories, our buried thoughts, our loves. Romero later told reporters that Kennedy’s lips were moving, and when Romero bent down to hear, Kennedy said “…is everybody OK?” “Yes, everybody’s OK,” Romero told him. Some five years earlier, John Kennedy’s assassination had obliquely intersected with Nick’s childhood. He starts telling us about it, shouts it at the windshield. “They got John in November, 1963!” he yells vibrantly. “They let us out of school early that day! I had to walk 18 blocks to get home! I shoulda taken a cab!”