The 10PM Bus

The commuter bus is a suburban microcosm. If you get on a bus into Denver from the Suburbs at 8:30AM, and you’re on one at 5:15PM every day, it says something about you. It says something about me. Me and people like me ride the commuter bus. We are predominately male and almost universally white. If we’re young, it’s because we’re in school, but most of us are middle-aged white men, in the middle of our careers, working 8 hours a day five days a week. We don’t talk to one another, or start up conversations. After all, our time is Valuable. Our bosses pay us $60 an hour. We don’t want to be interrupted. We speak English with a clear, untraceable Middle American accent. We read romance novels. We read spy novels. We use our $600 iPad as an e-reader (the form factor on the 5-inch $400 iPhone is no good for reading, as every good flagship phone buyer knows). We play Candy Crush. We add the latest numbers to our Excel spreadsheets and email them to accounting so that Dave can circle the wagons with the India team. We watch an episode of our favorite show on Netflix, even though the data is going to add $60 to our phone bill by the end of the month. In short, we take our suburban, high-margin lifestyle on the bus with us.

For us, the bus is a privilege, an optimization. We ride the bus because we believe cars are bad for the environment. We ride the bus because waiting for somebody to give our car an oil change for $15/hr is too much trouble. We ride the bus because we just put $80,000 down on our adorable $450,000 cottage in the heart of Louisville, and luckily for us the bus station is within walking distance. We ride the bus because our job gives us a 401k, a healthcare plan, and a free public transit pass. The bus is not critical to our lives, but it’s a nice to have. It’s convenient. It’s a little cheaper. It makes us feel a bit better about our consumption.

The 10PM Bus direct to Boulder, Colorado is a very different bus. I ride this bus from time to time and I’m always shocked by how, somehow, a completely different set of people get on board. At times, I’m convinced they must not even live in the same world I do. I never see them on the streets of my neighborhood. I have no friends or coworkers like them. Perhaps they are drawn out by the night, by the shade from the prying eyes of us commuter folk. In any case, here they are, one after another, people from all different walks of life.

I sat near the middle of the bus and watched them as they streamed by. A couple of older, bonneted women spoke Spanish. I caught snippets of their conversation about their family and their boss. A fat, bearded white guy wearing a Hatsune Miku t-shirt and cat ears. Three black people walked by my seat, which is more than I see on the 5PM bus in a week. There was a homeless man who had to get $1.10 donated to him by a nice black woman up front because he didn’t know he was taking a regional, not a local, bus. For some reason, the disabled, elderly men always take the 10PM bus to Boulder. Why aren’t they on the 5PM one? Why aren’t any of them on the 5PM one?

The 10PM bus is alive with conversations, struck up by strangers, not friends. The crackling of cheap food wrappers. The persistent cough of one of the older men, suffering from some mysterious disease after years of heavy smoking. One guy is playing rap music through his plain Apple earbuds loud enough for a tinny, thin version of it to leak into the surrounding seats. The 5PM bus is filled with “where do you work”s, “how are you”s, and “do you stop at Broomfield”s. But the 10PM bus always has something interesting to listen to.

A blonde haired early twenty-something with an earring and a nose piercing sat a seat ahead of me. After a couple minutes, a quiet, brown-haired boy with a ragged t-shirt and a weak southern accent sat to his left. As is the custom for the 10PM bus, the two started up a conversation. The blonde haired boy came into work at 9am today and just got off his shift. He wants to be a chef. He applied to 4 different places. He was not paid at all for the work he did today. This place had him in tentatively. He worked 10 hours for them. At the end of his shift, the manager gave him bad news. Sorry, he said. We’re not actively hiring. We just hired on a bunch of guys. Thanks for working, though. We appreciate it. Your resume is the top of the pile… if someone quits. I suspect they had no intention of even considering hiring him. The blonde haired guy has a house in Boulder where a couple of people have agreed to take him in. He pays nothing in rent, and wants a job so he can pay his hosts rent and get a career going. He is running out of cash fast and probably only has 2 more weeks. Today was yet another wasted day. The balance in his bank account sinks lowers. “that’s bullshit,” the brown haired boy mumbled. “Yeah, yeah. That’s how it is, beggars can’t be choosers, and all,” the blonde replied mildly.

The brown haired boy was considering a job for $16 an hour as a security guard at the Mile High Stadium. He knew about homelessness, he said. Once last year his parents kicked him out even though he was only 17. He lived on the streets for 2 weeks before a friend’s family took him in. Eventually his parents let him back in. He’s a senior in high school. He wants to get out of the house as soon as possible but he needs a job. His friend dropped out a week before graduation and started working at AutoZone. His friend has a baby on the way and it’s going to be hard to support a baby on $10 an hour. He doesn’t have a baby, though. His only major expense is that he smokes American Spirits. So maybe this $16 an hour gig will work out… but his parents say he should go to college.

“No way,” said the blonde haired guy. “What is $16 an hour? dude, if you go to college, you can make triple that. It ain’t worth it, $16. School makes everything way easier. I wish I could go.”

It was my stop. A homeless man turned to the boys and asked them for a dollar. “Shit, man, no change,” mumbles the brown haired boy. “Me neither,” the blonde echos. There’s genuine sympathy in his voice. “You don’t have a credit card, or something?” As he turns to face the bus driver, the homeless man says he hasn’t had a credit card in years.

“Wait — “ says the blonde, and he rummages around in his backpack. He drops three quarters into the homeless man’s hand. “All I got, sorry.”

The homeless man gives his thanks, several times, enunciating clearly, as if to press the point. He steps off the bus. As I follow him, I hear one last exchange.

“Hell,” the brown haired boy breathes. “that’s rough.”

“Yeah,” the blonde agrees. He’s silent for a moment, contemplating the man. He knows how close he is to that life. “That’s how it goes, sometimes.”

The brown haired boy exhales slowly. “Damn hard,” he whispers. “Damn hard.”

I have discovered that people ride the 10PM bus out of necessity. Their food service shift ends after they close up shop. They can’t afford the $5,000 down payment to lease a car; they’ve never even had that much money in their checking account at one time. They just finished a couple hours of heavy drinking and wouldn’t be safe in a car. They’re maybe not employed at all, and don’t have much of a schedule to keep. Just wandering. These people have none of the advantages, the cushy jobs, the free time, or the flexibility of the commuter riders.

I am profoundly uncomfortable on the 10PM bus.

I am profoundly uncomfortable because these people live such dramatically different lives from my own, but fundamentally, they are doing the same things I’m trying to do. They’re trying to build a better life. They’re trying to get an education. They’re trying to start a career. They’re making the best of the situation they have.

Why do I ride the 5PM bus and they the 10PM bus? What sorted me into the 70k/healthplan/iPad crowd, and not the american spirit cigarette/homeles man/$16-an-hour crowd?

The 10PM crowd sometimes makes bad choices. They smoke. They have kids too young. They have no marketable skills. They don’t do financial planning very well. Their vices get the better of them. They don’t think things all the way through. But none of these problems exist because they’re lazy, or they don’t care, or they’re not trying, or they’re worse people than me. I didn’t give that homeless man $0.75, after all. I didn’t work for free today just for the prospect of a job. I never had to deal with being abandoned by my parents for 2 weeks. I found myself thinking that these people don’t deserve the life they live. They were born into these situations. They entered a socio-economic context they had no control over.

And if they don’t deserve the 10PM bus life, what did I do to deserve the 5PM bus life?

I work hard, yes, but only because I like the work I do.

I know enough to become a highly-paid computer programmer, yes, but only because my parents could afford a good computer in 2006.

I’m a rational thinker, yes, but only because my parents encouraged that curiosity and I lived in a school district with at least tolerable education funding.

I’m smart, yes, but only because I was born to parents with genes for higher-than-average IQs and ways to develop my mind.

Every advantage handed to me is one that the 10PM crowd missed out on.

When you’re born, you roll a pair of dice. I rolled at least a 10. They rolled about a 4.

As the blonde man said: “that’s how it goes, sometimes.”