Was three stops from home on Route 79 when a girl who looked like Tracy Chapman got onto the bus and sat down a couple of spaces away from me at the back of the bottom deck. I imagined her to be an artist. The way she walked onto the bus, the clothes she wore. There was something fascinating about her. Something interesting. Her blue jeans had a left-wing, sort of socialist feel about them. Her purple top had a smattering of feminism in it. I would have loved to have started up a conversation with her; the surreality of Salvador Dali perhaps - or maybe the fugues of Bach’s symphonies. Or the brilliance of Tracy Chapman even. But protocol inhibited such a possibility. And besides, I was only three stops from home. As she sat down she looked at me for a second - and I offered a plastic smile back.
This momentary intrigue and fascination was shattered in seconds by what she did next though - and I still haven’t gotten over the shock of it. She so confidently bent down from her seat and picked at a blob of freshly discarded chewing gum stuck to the floor right near her feet. She pulled at it until it stretched right up to her head - until the stringiness of the gum broke apart - just like you remember doing with chewing gum in your mouth when you were a kid. She then turned her head upwards and with her upstretched arm manouvered this string of stretched chewing gum over her mouth and drew it right in - a bit like you do with a long string of spaghetti. And she started chewing!
She obviously caught me watching her do this out of the corner of her eye - because when she was done with what she just did - she turned and smiled a plastic, gum-chewing smile back at me. I didn’t know what to express at that moment. What she had just done was so in-your-face disgusting I just couldn’t believe that she had just done that. I quickly put my head down and pretended to carry on reading about the aerodynamics of paper aeroplanes (long story) but just could not stop thinking about what she had done. I just didn’t believe that that was her “style” - it was so at odds with what I had imagined her to be like in those few seconds after she boarded the bus. She had performed this shocking act so self-confidently that I wondered what had posessed her. A moment of madness perhaps? Or was that an example of her “normal” behaviour?
Alas I will never know. I got off the bus at my stop a few moments later and stared at her fixatedly through the bus window from the pavement as I walked on. She stared at me. Expressionless. Chewing that gum. We were still staring at each other as the bus pulled away - until it was gone.
Shocking.
Posted by jag at June 17, 2003 12:23 AM